Difficulty configuring exim for use with fetchmail and as external MTA.
Hi. I'm a new-ish Debian home user, and exim was the default
SMTP handler at installation time. I have a problem with exim
that I've put up with for quite some time; but enough is enough,
and I'm trying to solve it now, and hope someone can help.
I don't use exim to listen on port 25; no incoming SMTP connections
are allowed. I use exim 1) as an MTA for outgoing external mail,
and 2) as a local MDA.
Email sent to users on my host first goes to an IMAP server at my
ISP, speakeasy.net; I fetch it from them using fetchmail, which then
passes it off to exim for local delivery. Since the email grabbed by
fetchmail, and then passed to exim for local delivery, will come in
with addresses of the form <username@speakeasy.net>, exim needs to
recognize that incoming mail with that domain is indeed local, and
should be put in <username>'s mailbox in /usr/mail, rather than being
forward via outgoing SMTP back to mail.speakeasy.net. This implies
that "speakeasy.net" should be set as a local domain in exim.conf.
Also, outgoing email needs a domain tacked on. In particular,
outgoing external mail, to be passed to mail.speakeasy.net by SMTP,
needs "@speakeasy.net" to be tacked on to <username> in the "From:"
header. At present, I take care of this by having qualify-domain
-- the domain automatically tacked on to all unqualified addresses
-- set to "speakeasy.net".
THE PROBLEM: outbound external email to an address at speakeasy.net
which is not on my local host -- <some_external_user@speakeasy.net> --
fails. exim sees the "@speakeasy.net" and interprets the mail as being
local, because "speakeasy.net" is in the local domain list. It then
tries to deliver the mail to <some_external_user> on my local host, and
fails because there is no such user.
The only solution I can think of is to use something other than exim as
the local MDA (e.g. procmail or another MDA/MTA like qmail or whatever).
If I did that, then exim would no longer need to think that speakeasy.net
is a local domain. But that seems like a Rube Goldberg solution to what
I would naively think is a very common user situation.
What am I missing here? Any pointers would be appreciated. Thanks.
-c
--
Chris Metzler cmetzler@speakeasy.snip-me.net
(remove "snip-me." to email)
"As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I
have become civilized." - Chief Luther Standing Bear
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