[Nmh-workers] Stanford disliking my emails -- update + question

[Bob Carragher]

Hi everyone,

My apologies for this long posting!

I was wondering if someone could help me set up my /etc/hosts
file properly?

Previously, I had posted here about how  Stanford's email and
list servers (@stanford.edu, @lists.stanford.edu) had begun
aggressively tagging my emails and postings as spam.  In some
cases, they were simply (and silently) deleted.  Recipients
within stanford.edu would not receive my emails and list
postings would not reach the archives (or list members).  I
was using sendmail(8) in a broken way, and the kind folks here
helped me to change over to using send(1mh), which helped a
great deal.

But, Proofpoint (the tool Stanford uses to filter email) was
still tagging messages as spam, and some were still being
silently trashed.  Not as much as before, but not down to 0.
After poking and prodding Stanford IT a lot, a nice fellow
forwarded the following from Proofpoint:

     Received: from localhost.localdomain (c-71-202-61-143.hsd1.ca.comcast.net. 
 [71.202.61.143])
             by mx.google.com

     Home IP address (in San Jose) sending via LHLD to gmail.

At that point, my /etc/hosts file contained the following (to
make my semi-broken sendmail work for outbound email):

     127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain localhost ayukawa
     127.0.1.1       ayukawa
     [... plus some IP6 stuff...]

I guessed that "LHLD" referred to the "localhost.localdomain" bit
in the header.  A little googling turned up that a sending host
identifying itself as "localhost.localdomain" has come to be seen
as a compromised host.  So I removed it -- i.e.

     127.0.0.1       localhost ayukawa
     127.0.1.1       ayukawa
     [... plus some IP6 stuff...]

This has resulted in the header now reporting that email is
originating from hostname "ayukawa" -- e.g.

     Received: from ayukawa (c-71-202-61-143.hsd1.ca.comcast.net.  
[71.202.61.143])
             by mx.google.com

This has enabled emails to now go through, though some are
still being tagged as potential spam.  (But that's not the
problem I'm working on with this message.)

Unfortunately, this has resulted in sendmail(8) startup time,
and thus my bootup time, becoming very long.  Sendmail is
regularly generating the following messages (from the
/var/log/mail.err file):

     Apr 21 03:40:01 ayukawa sm-msp-queue[26058]: My unqualified host name 
(ayukawa) unknown; sleeping for retry
     Apr 21 03:41:01 ayukawa sm-msp-queue[26058]: unable to qualify my own 
domain name (ayukawa) -- using short name

So, is there something I can do to placate sendmail(8), while not
putting myself behind the 8-ball with Stanford again?  Googling
generally turns up "enter an FQDN into your /etc/hosts file," but
I don't have a valid FQDN.  It's why I used "localhost.localdomain"
in the first place.  One "help" page proposed the solution of
adding an entry with a terminating period -- i.e.

     127.0.0.1       localhost ayukawa ayukawa.
     127.0.1.1       ayukawa
     [... plus some IP6 stuff...]

Here's the page:

     http://www.unix.com/solaris/113819-unable-qualify-my-own-domain-name.html

What do the more knowledgeable folks here think?

Thanks!

                                Bob