Re: MTA hostname masquerading, and local mail delivery
David Stern <kotsya@u.washington.edu> writes:
> There are a lot of things about mail delivery that I'm unsure of right
> now. Having put more time into thinking about exactly what I want, I've
> become less certain about my configuration needs.
Well, you've certainly confused me. :)
> What I mean is that I want mail from root to kotsya@localhost.localdomai
> n to be delivered without the smtp server ever knowing about it, and
> vice versa.
>
> Does anyone do this? Which MTA do you use? Where are the rules or
> facilities to configure this? I'm willing to try just about anything
> that will work. If I've lost my marbles, please suggest something
> better.
Well, let me tell you what my machine is set up to do - it may help
you find a solution to your problem. More informationon how I
acheived my machine's setup can be found at
http://www.math.jhu.edu/~martind/mybox.html (a page which already
needs updating, despite only being about a month old...)
My machine is only connected to the internet intermittently (ppp
connection), and so it really has no fixed IP address or permanent
hostname visible from the outside. Internally, my machine always has
the hostname "cush". (why "cush"? Well, I'd already named the
terminal connected to it "nimrod", so...)
When I (as "martind@cush") send a piece of mail to "root" or to
"root@cush", it gets sent to the root account on my machine. Same
goes for when I send a piece of mail to postmaster@cush or just
postmaster. (and when I send a message to "jen@cush", it goes to my
girlfriend's account on my machine). All these messages have
"martind@cush" as the From: address.
When I send a mail message to debian-user@lists.debian.org or
president@whitehouse.gov or indeed to any non-cush address, the mail
is sent (as soon as my ppp connection goes up) to my department's smtp
server, which then sends it where it needs to go. On the way out,
smail on my machine re-writes the from address to
"dtm12@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu" (and puts some sort of appropriate value in
as the Sender field). That way, people can reply to me (or mail can
get bounced back to me) and it will get into a mailbox that I have
fetchmail (on my machine) check regularly. This is all completely
transparent to the MTA; as far as it's concerned, I might as well have
my own domain name. (that is, I don't have to set any variables in my
mail reader to tell it to use a different From: line)
At the moment my machine doesn't deal nicely with mail that is
forwarded through it, (i.e. from the outside back to the outside) but
I should probably just be killing those mails anyway.
Also, I've noticed with this setup that pine complains vociferously,
even though everything is just fine - I'm trying something out in a
couple days that ought to shut it up, though.
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