Sendmail....transient errors

[Kathleen]

Why would I get these errors listed on my server?

Transient parse error -- message queued for future delivery

We are getting alot of mail out. Its for a few addresses and when I see these errors, it seems like it is for the same addresses.

Thanks

[Helen French]

These type of errors normally indicated a nameserver failure. The nameserver can't find out a domain or host. Check your name resolution:

# nslookup

Also, for all hosts and the one which you have problems.

[Helen French]

Also, which OS are you using? There are some patches in some versions that can solve this issue if it's not a name resolution problem.

[S.K. Chan]

Sounds like DNS issue and that's why sendmail could not perform the relay. Search for transient+parse+error in this forum and you would get at some previous threads on this I bet.

[Kathleen]

We are using 11.0 with sendmail 9.8.3
Is the probem our resolution or issues with name resolution on their end?

[Kathleen]

And our servers here resolve just fine.....

[Steven E. Protter]

Another possible cause which I ran into was the relay server.

If you have the DS directive set in your /etc/mail/sendmail.cf file you could have and issue.

To check, look at the file

DS
[192.168.1.6] (This should be the IP address of the relay server.

We got this error becaue the smtp relay server was running software from Symmantec and badly needed a bunch of patches.

After that, everything was fine. I had the excact same error. It took 4 months to convince the relay servers admin to do anything.

SEP

[Helen French]

The name resolution should work from your end. You should get proper responses when communicating with your root name server.

# nslookup remote_hostname
# nslookup domainname
# nslookup ip_address

Also, check this patch for 11.11 and it has a solution for the problem (assuming your version is 8.9.3). I 've not tried it in 11.0, but you may try manually doing that:
http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/patchDocDisplay.do?patchId=PHNE_26305