Sendmail: quick question

[bpearcy]

When everyone speaks of "hostname" and "domainname" with respect to setting up sendmail, what do they mean? I've followed the posts on this site to get sendmail up and running. The domain name I'm using is php.classefind.com

when using terminal, it used to look this:
[localhost:/Users/bowes] root#

now it looks like:
[php:/Users/bowes] root#

and when I use sendmail to, well, send mail, the "From" field displays this:
www@php.classefind.com

Why did my terminal change? Also, I don't want my email to come from www@php.classefind.com, which doesn't even exist.

 

[macosx]

It's pretty easy really... if you think of names like a family, the domain name is your last name and the hostname is your first name. Here's a quick example:

developer.apple.com
The hostname would be "developer" the domain name "apple.com"

The default name for machines under OSX is "localhost" - which is usually quite acceptable. You must have changed it to "php" somewhere along the line. Since you've (obviously) enabled your root account, take a look in /etc/rc.boot and you'll see where it's defined.

You mention sendmail, although your message isn't specifically about that program. Mail servers often talk about FQDN, which is the fully-qualified domain name. That's just a fancy way of saying "hostname.domain-name" or in other words, the *full* name of your machine.

Your prompt changed because the default .cshrc sets it to include the short hostname.

There's no need to worry about your "From" email address being mislabelled- unless you're running your own SMTP server instead of using your ISP's, which I would guess is not the case.