Re: proper mailname

[Florian Kulzer <florian.kulzer+debian@icfo.es>]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 18:17:28 +0000, Tyler Smith wrote:
> On 2008-02-23, Andrei Popescu wrote:
> > On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 04:37:33PM +0000, Tyler Smith wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>=20
> >> I'm using exim/fetchmail/mutt to send and receive mail. However, I've
> >> noticed that several programs that try and send me messages are
> >> confused - things like sudo and at, which try and mail messages to
> >> root@sedgenet or tyler@sedgenet. sedgenet is just a made-up domain I
> >> picked when I set up my laptop, but now I see that I need to tweak
> >> something so that system-generated emails are properly routed. So
> >> should I change my etc/mailname, or is there some way to set an alias
> >> such that tyler@sedgenet and root@sedgenet are actually delivered to
> >> real email addresses.
> >
> > You could also setup your mail client to check your local mailbox. =20
> > Sylpheed and Claws-Mail can do this and I bet others as well. Or you=20
> > could just use 'mail' on the console, or are you expecting a lot of=20
> > local mail?
> >
> > If your exim is properly setup to send mail to the internet you could=20
> > also add an alias in /etc/aliases, but that would make all local mail go=20
> > across the internet, through your mailserver. Do you want that?
> 
> I think this is the problem - when at finishes a job it tries to send
> a message through my mailserver to the address tyler@sedgenet, instead
> of just dropping it in my local mailbox, var/mail/tyler. At least,
> that's what I think is happening. One of the messages I got is copied
> below, in case I'm misinterpreting the message and headers. My
> mailname is sedgenet, but my hostname is blackbart. Should these
> match? They're both invented names, and don't correspond to an actual
> mail server anywhere.

I think this should work:

Make sure that /etc/mailname says "sedgenet".

Then run "dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config" and set "System mail name" to
"sedgenet" and "Other destinations for which mail is accepted" to
"localhost;sedgenet". Leave the rest of the configuration as is
appropriate for your system. After exim4 has been restarted, try this:

echo "just a test..." | mail -s "test" tyler@sedgenet

If this works, run "exim4 -bp" to check if there are any frozen messages
stuck in the queue (in which case you can use "exim4 -qff" to make
another delivery attempt for all of them). 

-- 
Regards,            | http://users.icfo.es/Florian.Kulzer
          Florian   |