no change in connection to the mail server. clients connect, but time out. increase in the log level produced lines like this in /var/log/maillog: Jun 9 09:28:51 gungho sendmail[13243]: m59DRxV2013243: gungho [172.16.0.106] did not issue MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during connection to smtp 172.16.0.106 is the server address -Ray