exim and DNS

[Giuseppe Sacco <gsacco@hsomail.com>]

Hi peolples,
I have a problem running exim.

I am working on a side of a firewall that have a dns inside. We have a
pop3/smtp mailhost outside of this firewall that is not listed in our
DNS, so we use th set up our mail reader (Netscape for instance) with
the ip address af the externam mailhost machine.
We also have a domain for our e-mails.

I am now trying to set up a linux box inside of the firewall just for
personal usage. I set up exim to handle locally e-mail from me to me,
and I specified to send every message without domain to our mailhost
using the smartuser driver:

smartuser:
	driver = smartuser
	new_address = ${local_part}@mailhost

then I modified my /etc/hosts to include the mailhost host.

Now the problem: if I use ping or telnet or ftp then I can connect to
mailhost, but exim can't connect to mailhost because he just try to get
the address from the DNS. It seems to me that exim doesn't look at the
/etc/hosts file.

Is it true? Should I became DNS myself?

Thanks,
Giuseppe Sacco