[Pkg-exim4-users] mailname for outgoing mail

[Marc Haber]

On Thu, Jun 29, 2006 at 01:08:19PM -0700, Ross Boylan wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 11:09 +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> > Hmmm. Any idea how to explain this better?
> Without having the templates in front of me, this is hard.

http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-exim4/exim/trunk/debian/exim4-config.templates?op=file&rev=0&sc=0
links to the templates file of current exim4 mainline svn HEAD. Does
that help?

> It's also
> hard because it's hard to think of brief ways to say this.  Perhaps
> after the second question add (/etc/mailname only affects unqualified
> addresses, while this setting affects all adresses).
> 
> But the bigger thing that's puzzling is that there there are two
> questions that seem to be addressing the same issue, even if they differ
> in detail.

You mean the templates exim4/mailname and exim4/hide_mailname?

> Perhaps since /etc/mailname is the province of the whole system it
> should be the responsibility of the Debian installer to set it up, not
> the particular packages (mail, news, ....).

Maybe, but that would set a precendent. The common way to achive this
is in the packages using the file, but that's error prone and
duplicates efforts.

> > Very interesting. Can you explain exactly what happened? Did you have
> > betterworld.us in local_domains at this time?
> No.  Did I leave anything else out of the explanation below?

I don't know. In fact, I have not yet fully understood your setup and
how you have configured your exims. Maybe it's too complicated to
investigate any more, but if you want me to I'll spend some time in
trying to reproduce your issue. (mental note: Need to get vmware
installed).

> > Actually, this setup doesn't seem odd at all to me. I don't see any
> > problems, but since you had problems, things are weird and unclear to
> > me.
> Well, I was surprised that mail from corn ended up on wheat,

I am surprised about that as well. I suspect that you inadvertently
modified the list of local domains which made corn suddenly think that
your betterworld.us was not a local domain.

> but once it
> happened I decided it was exactly the behavior I wanted.  I think part
> of the reason it happened was that scripts that generated system mail
> (e.g., logcheck) used /etc/mailname in places,

These scripts usually use unqualified addresses and deliver mail via
/usr/bin/mail or /usr/lib/sendmail. Yes, in this case, you're going to
have the addresses qualified with the contents of /etc/mailname.

I have modified the README accordingly and hope that the new text is
better understandable. See
http://pkg-exim4.alioth.debian.org/README/README.Debian.html, chapter
2.1.1.3.

> and so appeared to be
> sending from and to betterworld.us, not corn.betterworld.us.  I
> deliberately didn't want corn picking up mail to betterworld.us, so it
> passed it on appropriately.

That is a possible explanation.

> Another thing I left out is that the new system (corn) was basically
> only getting its internal mail.  Almost all my mail continued to go to
> my "production" system.

>From my understanding, that was the intended behavior, as DNS mail
routing was not yet changed?

Greetings
Marc

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