Re: [exim/fetchmail] A day in the life of an email
On Thu, Dec 10, 1998 at 06:17:20PM +1030, Mark Phillips wrote:
>
> On Tue, 8 Dec 1998, Mike Touloumtzis wrote:
>
> > 3) Set qualify_domain = ist.flinders.edu.au to make your locally
> > generated mail appear to originate from that machine. This is
> > potentially not necessary if ist.flinders.edu.au accepts mail
> > for *.flinders.edu.au and the MX records are set up correctly
> > in the DNS, but I don't think it can hurt.
>
> Thanks for your help. Things are almost working. Only one problem at
> the moment.
>
> Setting the qualify_domain to ist.flinders.edu.au works well at making my
> email appear to originate from uni. The only problem is when at home
> I email to "mark", the email ends up at my account at uni. This is not
> the desired behaviour. "mark" is my local username and the email should
> have been sent locally. For some reason it is not. I presume that
> because I addressed the email to "mark" not to "mark@localhost", it
> decided to qualify it for me to "mark@ist.flinders.edu.au".
>
> Is there any way of getting it to make the from address appear to be
> "mark@ist.flinders.edu.au" while at the same time, allowing "mark"
> to be completed as "mark@localhost"?
>
Hmmm... the first thing to do is to check to see if mail for
yourhostname.flinders.edu.au ends up at ist.flinders.edu.au when sent
from the outside world. If this is the case, then you can just use your
hostname+domain for qualify_domain and replies should work OK (this is
the way my company's setup works; mail to miket@whatever.geoworks.com
will get to me). Try hostname.ist.flinders.edu.au as your local
host/domain + qualify_domain too, as 'ist' is not the real hostname of
your smarthost--see below).
I played around with 'dig' for a sec, and it looks this depends
on frodo.cc.flinders.edu.au (AKA flinders.edu.au, and the catchall
mail destination for your university according to the MX records)
if your machine is hostname.flinders.edu. If your machine is
hostname.ist.flinders.edu, it depends on ist.flinders.edu.au, AKA
adam.ist.flinders.edu.au. Frodo resolves to a different IP than adam,
so these are probably distinct machines. One or both of these machines
might know enough about you to get mail to your spool just based on your
username. 'ist' sounds like a better bet, as it's more specific to you.
frodo.cc.flinders.edu.au's SMTP server accepts mail for
<mark@randomhostname.flinders.edu.au>, but that doesn't mean anything
nowadays; many servers delay bounces to make it harder for spammers to
verify addresses. The only way to find out for sure is to try it.
Note that the success of this may also depend on whether or not your
smarthost will rewrite your email address. Sendmail has some advanced
anti-spam features to verify senders, and a bogus hostname might throw it.
Again, the only way to find out is to try.
Barring this, your best option is probably to use the address rewriting
features of exim (set your real hostname+domain as the qualify_domain, but
rewrite them to the smarthost for mail that leaves the machine). This is
something I have never used myself, but I took a quick look at spec.txt
in the exim docs, and it appears that you can turn rewriting on and off
for each director rule, and specify rewriting options for both envelope
and headers. There's also the command line 'exim -brw addr@host.domain'
that will spit out the rewritten versions for testing purposes.
miket
Reply to: