"Local Recipients" in Sendmail

[cleverhandle]

So now I'm understanding why people stay away from this thing... I have two questions, which I think are related.

1) First, I want to make sure my solution to one problem was correct. I'm setting up a mail server for my small domain, and have a single MX record for domain.org pointing to mail.domain.org (see also #2). I was getting "relaying denied" errors trying to receive remote mail for user@domain.org, but mail to user@mail.domain.org was received just fine. The problem appeared to be that sendmail did not consider user@domain.org to be a "local recipient." My solution was to add domain.org to /etc/mail/local-host-names. Is this the correct method? I do not intend to receive mail (directly) on any machines besides the mail server.

2) Second, I've read that wildcard MX records are bad because they will cause mail to be deliverd even if the host does not exist. But I'm not sure that what I have is considered to be a wildcard MX. Should I be providing an MX for each resolvable host, and nothing for domain.org? Then I would have to tell sendmail that each host should be considered local, as described in #1?

Many thanks for any help...

 

[Fuzznuts]

sendmail mail will get its first hostname form the hostname file. And yes how you worked aorund it was the correct way to do it you could have changed the hostname but not alot of point either way will work 🙂

as for the MX record. the correct way to do it is to have the MX record point to a cname that is the same as the hostname of the mail server again this would require you to tinker with hostnames and local domains but again it will work.

not quite sure what your were driving at with 2 maybe you can clarify?

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: Fuzznuts
sendmail mail will get its first hostname form the hostname file. And yes how you worked aorund it was the correct way to do it you could have changed the hostname but not alot of point either way will work 🙂

OK, cool. I figured this was correct.

as for the MX record. the correct way to do it is to have the MX record point to a cname that is the same as the hostname of the mail server again this would require you to tinker with hostnames and local domains but again it will work.

Hmm... my impression was that you specifically are not supposed to MX to a CNAME - cf. the O'Reilly Sendmail book, section 9.3.2 "MX to CNAME is illegal". Though from what I can see, it's not so much dangerous as just prone to error and somewhat expensive in terms of DNS lookups.

not quite sure what your were driving at with 2 maybe you can clarify?

I'm thinking of this section of the Sendmail FAQ in particular.