mail confusion

Jay Moore jaymo at mail.bokler.com
Mon Nov 7 03:20:17 UTC 2005


On Sun, 2005-11-06 at 18:36 -0600, Robert Nichols wrote:
> Derek Martin wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 06, 2005 at 12:05:11PM -0600, Robert Nichols wrote:
> > 
> >>For root, you can't get away with just eliminating "root" as an
> >>EXPOSED_USER in sendmail.mc and relying on MASQUERADE_DOMAIN because
> >>that will result in translating root at localhost.localdomain" to
> >>"root at some.real.host", which would be very wrong.
> > 
> > 
> > This is absolutely true, positively.  Except that for Jay's purposes,
> > it probably doesn't matter.  If he's only trying to send mail out to
> > himself, and will be careful not to use the address for any other
> > purpose (i.e. he doesn't intend to reply to the message) then it
> > doesn't really matter what the address is, so long as it is a "valid"
> > one (in this case, not localhost.localdomain, and probably something
> > that's resolvable, depending on his ISP).
> > 
> > Strictly speaking, to solve Jay's problem, all that is really required
> > is to make sendmail stop sending mail out as localhost.localdomain.  I
> > believe that the easiest solution to that problem *should* be to just
> > set LOCAL_DOMAIN to some reasonable value in the *.mc files, re-make
> > the config files, and restart sendmail.  Even masquerading really
> > shouldn't be necessary.
> 
> That would be true if the mail were being submitted from "root".  If the
> submission is from "root at localhost.localdomain" then the bare minimum
> requirement would be masquerading (without "root" as an EXPOSED_USER)
> to map that to "root at something.else".  Without knowing exactly how the
> mail is being submitted there's no way to know whether that would work.

The mail is being submitted by 'smartd', the smartmontools daemon...
according to the docs, they use 'mail' (don't know why). Since smartd
runs (at least starts) as root, I guess the message *is* being submitted
from root. 

Does that clarify anything?

Thanks,
Jay




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