Ubuntu – Why does sending email via mutt work to gmail but not to evernote

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I have freshly installed sendmail and mutt on Ubuntu 14, with no configuration. It works fine like this when sending a test email to a gmail account, e.g.

mutt -s 'test 1' < /dev/null -- me@example.com

This arrives with no problem. But change nothing except the email address to an evernote acccount:

mutt -s 'test 1' < /dev/null -- me.xxxxxx@m.evernote.com

… and the email never arrives, although this command exits with code 0 and no output to stdout or stderr.

I have confirmed that the evernote account and email address work by sending an email from the gmail account to the evernote account. It arrives with no problem.

I have set the "from" setting in mutt to be the same as it is in the gmail account, in case Evernote is being selective, which it shouldn't be, but no difference.

Here are the headers of a successful email via sendmail from my local box to my gmail account.

Why might mutt or sendmail be able to send to one verified working email address but not to another? How can I debug this?

Update: This was in /var/log/mail.log:

Oct  4 17:00:40 felix sm-mta[11608]: t94K9ICL000793: to=<me.xxxxx@m.evernote.com>, ctladdr=<mori@felix> (1000/1000), delay=02:51:21, xdelay=00:00:02, mailer=esmtp, pri=1769303, relay=m.evernote.com. [204.154.94.70], dsn=4.1.8, stat=Deferred: 450 4.1.8 <mori@felix>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found
Oct  4 17:01:01 felix sm-msp-queue[11592]: unable to qualify my own domain name (felix) -- using short name

So Sender address rejected: Domain not found and unable to qualify my own domain name (felix) -- using short name. Does this mean that I need to change the domain name on outgoing emails to something publicly registered in order for my email to be accepted by some servers? Is this a common requirement? Should I do this via sendmail or mutt, and how?

Best Answer

Evernote doesn't like your sender address:

stat=Deferred: 450 4.1.8 <mori@felix>: Sender address rejected: Domain not found

"felix" is not a domain name. At most, it is a bare host name, and that has no meaning outside your own network.

Some mail servers are configured to reject mail without a fully-qualified domain name (FQDN), usually because a lot of spam is sent like that. Looks like evernote's server are configured that way (it's odd, though, that it tempfails with 4xx rather than permanent fail with 5xx).

You need to configure mutt and/or sendmail to use a valid FQDN....maybe put the FQDN rather than just the short hostname in /etc/mailname and restart sendmail.

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