How to get mail to local destinations delivered?
Chris G
cl at isbd.net
Sun Nov 11 14:28:07 UTC 2007
On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 01:53:29PM +0100, Gijs wrote:
>
>
> You can send root's mail to a user like so (in /etc/aliases):
> root: chris
> But if you really want mail to get delivered to an emailaddress
> without going through the internet, you'll have to setup your own
> pop3/imap server, along with corresponding domain-setups (like John
> already mentioned before). But is it really that big of a problem to
> go through all this hassle? Setting your email address in the aliases
> file does mean its a long round trip for the email, but in the end the
> mail does get delivered to the correct person.
>
No, no, no, no, no, no!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's the MS/Windows/PC view of the world! :-)
On a (proper) unix system mail arrives in the user's mail spool file,
typically /var/mail/<username> and sensible mail clients know how to
get it from there (e.g. 'mail', 'mailx', 'mutt').
sendmail knows that *local* mail is delivered to the mail spool.
In fact I have found that sendmail thinks this system is called
isbd.net and thus mail sent to chris at isbd.net gets put into the file
/var/mail/chris by sendmail. Thus I have put:-
root: chris at isbd.net
at the end of /etc/aliases and all is now OK.
What I *don't* quite understand is why sendmail thinks this is
isbd.net and why I couldn't tell it what the system should really be
called. Everything else (apache, ssh, etc.) thinks it's called
home.isbd.net.
--
Chris Green
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