mail server connection hanging forever

[bof@oknodo.bof.de]

> - sendmail is brain-damaged because it tries an ident/auth connection
>   to see who sent the message.

Agreed; SMTP servers should not do ident. It does not scale.

> - Nobody should run identd anyway: no-one
>   deserves to know who your users are

This is a misconception. It is up to you what your identd replies.
It may well be an MD5 hash of your user names, or something.
The only person to whom the identd reply must have meaning, is the
admin of the box running identd. For long-running, individual-user
connections to services likely to provoke abuse processing (e.g. irc),
that's a valuable thing to do. For mail (short running connections
without much abuse trouble, once you are not a wide open relay), it
does not make sense.

> Getting email though is *important*.

Then the server you want to get it through should run a properly
set up SMTP server.

I agree with your wish for an RST knob, anyway.

regards
  Patrick