CentOS

I'm running centos-6.7 server (command line only) with sendmail-8.14.4-9.el6.x86_64. I can't send emails, I keep getting an error in the maillog for each send attempt which says:

stat=Deferred: Temporary AUTH failure <snip> AUTH=client, available mechanisms do not fulfill requirements <snip> temporary failure, connection abort.

I've been trawling google but I can't find a solution, I get the impression I'm missing some kind of sasl component but I don't know what it is and I can't find a centos-based solution. Thanks for any help.

The usual fix for sendmail problems is to remove it and install postfix instead Actually, do that the other way around - install postfix and then remove sendmail - it stops yum from trying to remove everything that needs an MTA package installed.

I'm not interested in postfix, I use sendmail and always have.

I would expect most people here use the default mail server postfix, so you're probably better off asking in a sendmail forum.

Normally in the log file there is a queue-id associated with the "stat=..." messages. Use this queue-id the search for other related log messages in the same log.

I solved it, I was missing a cyrus-sasl package but I don't know which one so I ran yum install cyrus-sasl* and it installed a load of them and now sendmail works.
Just for good measure i also did:
service saslauthd restart and
service sendmail restart
but I don't know if this was needed.