Bug#685045: exim complains about my PC's name not being fully qualified name

David Lawyer dave at lafn.org
Thu Aug 16 02:27:10 UTC 2012


Package: exim4
Version: 4.80-3

When exim runs, such as at boot-time, I get the error message:

hostname --fqdn did not return a fully qualified name, dc_minimaldns will not 
work. Please fix your /etc/hosts setup.

My /etc/hostname contains one line: davespc and it doesn't have a domain
since I only dialup to my ISP once in a while to get/send email.  So
there is no reasonable way to make it fully qualified.  If I claim my
hostname to be that of my ISP, then mail to me originating on my PC
(error notifications from software, etc.) would be sent to my ISP first
which is not needed, especially if I spend most of my time on the PC but
off the internet.  I've set things up so that mail to me from my PC is
sent directly to me at dave at davespc.  I've configured Fetchmail to use
this as the smtpname which rewrites incoming envelope-to's to
dave at davespc.  And my outgoing email client puts my email address:
dave at lafn.org in the header from and also uses it at the evelope from
when passing the message to exim.  It all works fine except for the
erroneous error message shown above (probably from the debian
enhancements to exim).

Although it's not part of the above problem, I also have exim rewrite
incoming envelope-to's to dave at davespc.  While fetchmail rewrites them
and local mail from my pc uses dave at davespc there's another 3rd case of
incoming email.  This case has the evelope-to being dave at davespc.  This
case is when exims tries to hand-off outgoing email to my ISP but for
some reason my ISP rejects it and exim then tries to return it to the
sender which is dave at lafn.org.  Then explicit rewriting of incoming To's
is needeed so I've put such a rewrite in the exim template configuration
file.  This part of the template file uses /etc/email-addresses to
rewrite From's (F flag) but not To's (T flag) which I need so I had to
add this.

   			David Lawyer



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