Relaying denied revisited

Recently I was called about complaints of workflow mailer failing to send outgoing mails, after the database server failed over. We use the sendmail daemon of the database server as the mail server. On checking the /etc/hosts file of the server, I found that it did not have the entries for the application tier servers. Sendmail always checks if a host which is trying to send mail is present in the mail server's /etc/hosts file. After adding the servers, relaying denied was resloved.

As discussed in a previous post, Sendmail does these checks:

1. Checks whether the host trying to send mail is in /etc/hosts
2. Does a reverse DNS lookup on the IP of the host trying to send mail, to see if the name is same as that reported by the host. For example if the host reports its name as appserver.justanexample.com (based on /etc/hosts of mail server), but a reverse DNS lookup shows that the name of the server is appserver.dev.justanexample.com, then Sendmail will reject it with Relay Denied error