Re: exim wierdness

[Shyamal Prasad <shyamal.prasad@sbcglobal.net>]

    "Rohan" == Rohan Nicholls <rohan.nicholls@informaat.nl> writes:

    Rohan> Shyamal Prasad wrote:

    >> What error? Please tell us what exim complains about as
    >> precisely as you can.

    >> What does '/usr/sbin/exim -bt rohan.nicholls@informaat.nl'
    >> produce?

    Rohan> rohannLinux:~$ /usr/sbin/exim -bt
    Rohan> rohan.nicholls@informaat.nl user "rohan.nicholls" for file
    Rohan> existence test not found 
    Rohan> rohan.nicholls@informaat.nl is undeliverable: 
    Rohan>   unknown local-part "rohan.nicholls" in domain "informaat.nl"


What this means is your exim configuration thinks informaat.nl is your
Linux machine. It is looking for a user on your machine called
"rohan.nicholls" and not finding it.

    Rohan> So now these work: nichollsrohan@hotmail.com
    Rohan> rohan.nicholls@canoemail.com

That is because hotmail.com and canoemail.com are not "local domains"
for exim. What do you get if you run the exim command above on these
addresses? 

    Rohan> and this does not: rohan.nicholls@informaat.nl

    Rohan> When exim installed it ran what I assume is eximconfig, and
    Rohan> confused me terribly.  How do I get it to stop thinking it
    Rohan> is the domain mailer, and just send the mail, which it is
    Rohan> doing a good job of except to my work addresses....

Do you remember what option you chose when you ran eximconfig?
Basically, you should never enter 'informaat.nl' into eximconfig at
any point, because you do not want it treated specially.

    >> I am presuming of course that informaat.nl is *not* the mail
    >> domain

    >> for you Debian machine.
    Rohan> That is right, it is my work domain.

Look in /etc/exim/exim.conf for a line like this

local_domains = localhost:informaat.nl

That is probably the culprit (particularly if you chose the smarthost
option in eximconfig). Remove informaat.nl from it, make sure that
only localhost and your hostname are defined as local_domains (read
the comments in the file for this variable), rerun the exim command
with -bt to test that the informaat.nl domain is treated similarly to
the others.

    Rohan> exim is something I have not grocked at all and even after
    Rohan> reading the documentation I am still confused.

Yeah, the exim documentation is written as a reference, not a
tutorial. It is stunning in volume, but hard to learn from. Sounds
like a lot of the rest of Unix  ;-)

Cheers!
Shyamal