To summarize my original post, the implementation of the alias
First.Last:jdoe@beaux in /etc/aliases seemed to "bend" sendmail. Such that
the To: line in the mail header sent FROM netcom.com TO the recipient alias
John.Doe on atwc.teradyne.com read:
Instead of
To: John.Doe@atwc.teradyne.com
My heartiest Thanx! to all who responded to my cry for help. Responses
generally fell into 3 categories,
1. First.Last works fine with our system.
-- Hmmmm... so mine "should" be working too?
-- could be an alias loop.
Wasn't looping at all.
2. Use First_Last and forget about it.
-- For one thing, this doesn't fix the problem, only avoids it
-- for later confusion. For another thing, it's easier to use
-- a dot in typing than and underscore. Lastly, the Higher Mucky-Mucks
-- want to use a dot.
3. Some hacked sendmail to fix the problem. Thanx to Yves Morin who sent
specific sendmail lines to look at and change as necessary:
> If your mail exchanger use ddn as its mailer (ddn,ether,...) there are 2 lines in
> /etc/sendmail.cf which needs be commented and 1 line uncommented.
>
> # Pass other valid names up the ladder to our forwarder
> #R$*<@$*.$=T>$* $#$M $@$R $:$1<@$2.$3>$4 user@domain.known
>
> # Replace following with above to only forward "known" top-level domains
> #R$*<@$*.$+>$* $#$M $@$R $:$1<@$2.$3>$4 user@any.domain
>
> # if you are on the DDN, then comment-out both of the the lines above
> # and use the following instead:
> R$*<@$*.$+>$* $#ddn $@ $2.$3 $:$1<@$2.$3>$4 user@any.domain
BTW, we use the .mx version of sendmail. Eckhard Rueggeberg pointed out
that the dot notation works fine in subsidiary sendmail. Then Yves says that
it works in the .mx version. Hmmmm... I ask myself, could the email be passing
through another machine that munched the To: line?
FOUND THE PROBLEM:
Sure enough, the MX record for the domain above atwc.teradyne.com was pointing to
an Ultrix machine. Ah yes. This machine is scheduled not to be doing this kind
of forwarding anyway, so we changed the MX record to point to a Sun.
Lo & Behold, First.Last worked! Well, at least on any machine not running the
Ultrix sendmail.cf that beaux forwards the mail to. That means I still need to fix
the sendmail.cf on the Ultrix host(s), but at least I now have a good place to
start. So, First.Last always worked with the Sun sendmail.cf so #1, above, was
right.
Thanks to those who told me that things oughta be working, and to those who
noted that since it isn't working quite right to check the .cf more closely.
I'll be hacking the Ultrix .cf (ugh!) or converting it to Sun's with the
DECnet rulesets and mailers hacked in...
From: birger@vest.sdata.no (Birger A. Wathne)
From: eckhard@ts.go.dlr.de (Eckhard Rueggeberg)
From: erueg@cfgauss.uni-math.gwdg.de (Eckhard Rueggeberg)
From: shahid (Shahid I. Choudhry)
From: yves.morin@BComeau.Hydro.Qc.CA
From: don@mars.dgrc.doc.ca (Donald McLachlan)
From: espiritu@cgi.com (Rex Espiritu)
From: sylvest!ed%sylvman.sylvest.com@uunet.UU.NET (Ed Haggerty)
From: fabrice@pure.com (Fabrice Guerini)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:07:43 CDT