Eureka! I have finally understood and solved this problem properly (I think!). The issue is that sendmail needs to know all the aliases for the system receiving mail. If you do 'host home.isbd.net' you get:- home.isbd.net is an alias for 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net. 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net has address 84.45.228.40 Thus my problem is fixed if I add the 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net alias to my /etc/hosts file:- 192.168.1.1 home.isbd.net home 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net Yes, I know I have put "home.isbd.net home" rather than the "home home.isbd.net" that I originally had but this isn't what fixes the problem. Without the 84-45-228-40.no-dns-yet.enta.net it still fails in the way it did before. I think the 'connect back to ourselves' is actually done within sendmail as "telnet 192.168.1.1 25" just gets a connection refused and "telnet 84.45.228.40 25" just times out. The added alias in /etc/hosts seems to tell sendmail somehow to not try and go out and back in again. I can now send mail to 'root' and 'chris' and sendmail puts it into their local spool in /var/spool/mail, and I can just add:- root: chris at the end of /etc/aliases and it does what I expect. Phew! I thought the fix would be trivial when I found it! :-) Thanks for all the thoughts and efforts everyone. -- Chris Green -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list