Just a follow up - When I re-read my original message, I realized that I was a bit unclear. What I am hoping to discover is why exim finds an apparently bad IP for my smarthost when I send messages to some servers. It looks to me like some kind of DNS issue, although I'm not sure, as I'm still fairly new to all this - I changed over from Windows around Christmas, and I'm teaching myself things as I go. If it is a bad DNS lookup, how could I prevent it, and does anyone know why it's happening? I have two DNS sites provided by my ISP, and I suppose I could comment one out, or I could set exim to use the physical IP as the smarthost, rather than the domain name (what I mean is use the numbers rather than the letters, if you see what I mean), although both of these seem to me to be steps that reduce overall functionality rather than increase it - if my smarthost for whatever reason changes it's physical address but keeps the domain name the same, I lose mail. If I comment out a DNS site, and the other one is out of sync, I have a hard time finding sites. Anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks in advance, Steve By the way - I would like to thank everyone on this list. Just reading through the mails (even the ones that don't address issues I'm currently having a problem with) has taught me a lot about the way Debian and Linux order and run things. It may have been the best Christmas present I've given myself - a computer that doesn't freeze, and a list of helpful, polite people willing to be tech support. Thanks again.
