[rt-users] Reply to address

[rtusers-lists-fsck-com at jal.org]

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Bob Goldstein wrote:

> 
> Don't know about postfix, but I ran into something similar
> recently.  I configured a machine whose dns arecord was
> "machinename" and a cname of "domainname" pointing to it.
> My naive intention was to use the cname as the publically
> visible name, so I could move RT to another box later.
> 
> Well, sendmail itself translates the cname in To or From
> into the arecord on the fly.  So even though I properly
> sent mail to rt at domainname, it arrived addressed to
> rt at machinename.
> 
> I couldn't find any way around this.  So for admin reasons
> here, I'm going to assign a separate IP (with arecord).
> The box will have it's machinename identity with one IP+arecord
> and a second identity as rt with a separate IP (that I can
> then move to another box.)

Yes, this is normal sendmail behaviour (sort of - there are a variety of
ways to control what it does with those addresses, depending heavily on
your environment).

There are too many different variables controlling what gets stuck
there to give a proper answer for what you should do to fix this, but
one observation is that sendmail expects DNS to be configured properly.
You should have an MX record for the machine, and an MX record
shouldn't point to a CNAME. You can work around this by adding the CNAME
to the w class, something like 

Cwfoo.uic.edu

where 'foo.uic.edu' is whatever domainname you want to use. But that's
not ideal.

The Right Thing To Do(tm) is to fix your DNS and create an m4 config with 
proper DEAFAULT_HOST, and add PSEUDONYM entries as needed.

Sendmail has a steep learning curve, and if you don't want to climb it,
postfix is a great alternative with comparatively friendly
configuration. I personally like sendmail, but that might be Stockholm
Syndrome. And a careful look at headers will show that our company network 
uses postfix now.

-j

-- 
Jamie Lawrence                                        jal at jal.org
There are no answers, only cross-references.