RHEL 5.5 - Sendmail acting strange behaviour

[Barry Brimer]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2010, James Corteciano wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I have strange behaviour of sendmail. I have installed fresh vanilla of RHEL
> 5.5 and able to send test mail outside. After less than 6 hours, this is the
> error I got.
>
> # /etc/init.d/sendmail restart
> Shutting down sm-client:                                   [FAILED]
> Shutting down sendmail:                                    [FAILED]
> Starting sendmail: 451 4.0.0 /etc/mail/sendmail.cf: line 91: fileclass:
> cannot open '/etc/mail/local-host-names': World writable directory
> 451 4.0.0 /etc/mail/sendmail.cf: line 588: fileclass: cannot open
> '/etc/mail/trusted-users': World writable directory
>                                                           [FAILED]
> Starting sm-client: /etc/mail/submit.cf: line 544: fileclass: cannot open
> '/etc/mail/trusted-users': World writable directory
>                                                           [FAILED]
>
> # ls -l /etc/mail/local-host-names
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 64 Jan 22 20:37 /etc/mail/local-host-names
> # ls -l /etc/mail/trusted-users
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 127 Jan 22 20:37 /etc/mail/trusted-users
>
>
> How to fix this?

I suspect the /etc/mail directory itself is world-writable as indicated by 
the message above.  Please examine the permissions of the /etc/mail 
directory.  I believe the correct permissions for /etc/mail are 755.