Peter Miller <pmil...@opensource.org.au> writes:
> I am having an email problem that I do not recall dealing with. The problem
> is /etc/mailname, that is supposed to contain "the visible mail name of the
> system".
>
> Just what does that mean for a DHCP client behind a NAT gateway?
Whatever you want it to mean: the purpose of it is to help the machine
generate an email address from a local user name, for the convenience of the
users.
We typically set it to the public address, since that is most useful at work,
but for a home system it varies.
> Mostly, this isn't relevant. You send your email to the local relay host
> and it makes its way to the destination, and returns to you via the From or
> Reply-To header.
>
> Just lately, tho, I have been trying to talk to some Debian machines
> with particularly anal configurations. They are barfing because
>
> "| 2010-08-22 11:28:07 H=tibor.swiftel.com.au [202.154.123.78]
> F=<pmil...@hawk.miller.emu.id.au> rejected RCPT
> <chan...@db.debian.org>: Sender verify failed"
>
> which I'm guessing is buried in some header other than From: or Reply-To:
That would be the SMTP envelope, and the reason it rejects your mail up-front
is that you have given it absolutely no way to reject it at any later stage in
the process, if it needs to.
Which, incidentally, isn't particularly anal: lots of sites do that, and all
for pretty much the same reason, which is that they don't want undeliverable
email sent to their systems.
(In case it isn't clear: no, this isn't "some header", but the other part of
the SMTP protocol and all.)
> The only file in /etc with hawk.miller.emu.id.au in it is /etc/mailname
>
> So (guessing here) db.debian.org is more anal than the hundreds of other
> hosts I have sent email to over the last decade or so, and it wants
> /etc/mailname to be something else. The question is, what?
They want the SMTP envelope sender to be a deliverable email address. It
doesn't matter what it is, provided that there are MX records to allow the
email to be returned.
For your purposes that makes it "whatever domain your email headers claim it
to be from", at a guess.
[...]
> Or do I just set it to the FQDN of my preferred email address?
> (Even though that would only accurate for a single user, apparently it
> has been accurate for zero up until now.)
This is probably the least-worst option.
Daniel
--
✣ Daniel Pittman ✉ dan...@rimspace.net ☎ +61 401 155 707
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