Re: MTA hostname masquerading, and local mail delivery
On Sun, 14 Dec 1997 22:17:17 EST, wrote:
>
> Well, you've certainly confused me. :)
At least I can communicate clearly that I am confused.
> 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...)
I went through your and Steve Kosteke's (sp?) files last night. I was
looking for two things before deciding to switch to smail: rules to
rewrite the hostname (masquerade) on a user basis at the system level,
and I want my local mail to be delivered without smtp server awareness.
Towards the end of this I have a new criteria.
> 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...)
Um.. cush:nimrod ?? Hmm.. I guess you had to be there. :-)
> 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.
Presumably it gets sent without your smtp server's awareness. OK,
that's the second criteria I'm looking for, so I see smail can do that.
> 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)
I think you mean outbound mail header rewriting is transparent to your
MUA (or email client), not your MTA (smail). I understand that.
Is your outgoing mail hostname rewriting done for all users (i.e.:
including root) ? I've gotten this to work on a user basis with
sendmail by masquerading globally and excluding root, but with some
resulting conflicts; namely that all mail awaits the smtp server, which
subsequently causes local mail to be undeliverable, but I read the
headers in /var/spool/mailq, and it's right. :-)
A new potential criteria for my MTA has arisen: One question I've
skirted is if root or other users who do not have isp accounts should
be allowed to send non-local mail. If they do, they'll have invalid
"From:" lines in their headers, no matter if the hostname is rewritten
or not--shouldn't non-local mail sent from users without an isp account
be disallowed? How can I only allow specific users access to the smtp
server (to send non-local mail)?
> 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.
I'm not sure what you mean by Pine complains but everything is fine.
However, shutting up Pine (and thus my isp, the authors of Pine) is a
good thing, as long as it is complete.
While I await further clarification from you, I'm going to check into
some crufty sendmail features I recently discovered.
Thanks for the response, sendmail config is pretty difficult.
--
David Stern
kotsya@u.washington.edu
http://weber.u.washington.edu/~kotsya/
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