[OLUG] sendmail/DNS woes

[Phil Brutsche]

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said...

> 
> Let me explain what I am trying to do, then I will tell you what is wrong.
> 
> At work, we would like to send Internet email through some UNIX machines.
> The easiest way to do this is to relay the mail off of our internal mail 
> server.  However, we can only send relay internal mail off of the mail
> server - all other mail is rejected for policy reasons.  
> 
> So now we are on Plan B.  I'm setting up a Linux machine that we can use
> to relay the mail.  How I set up bind on that machine is that the machine 
> knows about the internal network and forwards all other DNS requests to
> our firewall.  This seems to work, at first:
> 
> 
> mikeh at mikeh:~ > nslookup
> Default Server:  localhost.gsi.com
> Address:  127.0.0.1
> 
> > set q=mx
> > yahoo.com
> Server:  localhost.gsi.com
> Address:  127.0.0.1
> 
> Non-authoritative answer:
> yahoo.com       preference = 1, mail exchanger = mx2.mail.yahoo.com
> yahoo.com       preference = 0, mail exchanger = mx1.mail.yahoo.com
> 
> 
> However, when I try to send mail to it, I get this:
> 
> mikeh at mikeh:~ > /usr/lib/sendmail -v thehaas at yahoo.com
> test
> .
> thehaas at yahoo.com... Host unknown (Name server: 199.221.35.1: host not
> found)
> /home/mikeh/dead.letter... Saved message in /home/mikeh/dead.letter
> Postmaster... aliased to root
> root... Connecting to local...
> root... Sent
> 
> Okay, so what's happening??  To me, it looks like sendmail is not parsing
> the line correctly - it thinks that thehaas at yahoo.com is a machine, not
> an address.
> 
> Anyone have any suggestions??? Or perhaps there is an easier way to do
> this?

This is what the sendmail manpage that I have access to says:

       -v     Go into verbose mode.  Alias expansions will be announced,
              etc.

I don't think that's what you're looking for.  This might be it:

       -bm    Deliver mail in the usual way (default).

Fortunately, my Exim manpage is much more verbose:

       -bm    Accept  an  incoming,  locally-generated message on
              the current input, and deliver it to the  addresses
              given  as  the command arguments (except when -t is
              also given - see below). Each  argument  can  be  a
              comma-separated  list of RFC 822 addresses. This is
              the default option, and is assumed if no other con
              flicting option is present.

              The format of the message must be as defined in RFC
              822, except that, for compatibility  with  sendmail
              and smail, a line in one of the forms

               From sender Fri Jan  5 12:55 GMT 1999
               From sender Fri, 5 Jan 97 12:55:01

              (with the weekday optional, and possibly with addi
              tional text after the date) is permitted to  appear
              at the start of the message. There appears to be no
              authoritative specification of the format  of  this
              line.  Exim  recognizes  it by matching against the
              regular expression defined by the uucp_from_pattern
              option,  which  can  be  changed  if necessary. The
              specified sender is treated as if it were given  as
              the  argument  to the -f option, but if a -f option
              is also present, its argument is used in preference
              to  the  address taken from the message. The caller
              of Exim must be a trusted user for the sender of  a
              message to be set in this way.

If that's not what the problem is, the I'm as lost as you are.

-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Phil Brutsche					pbrutsch at creighton.edu

"There are two things that are infinite; Human stupidity and the
universe. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein


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