Hello all,
I have a question about the forwarding mechanism used by qmail. I
have looked through the documentation, manpages, and searched the
mailing list archives without finding an adequate answer. I am
running qmail in the default manner described in the documentation
(read: no hairy configurations, all the defaults). As such, we are
using mbox format in $HOME/Mailbox mailboxes and all remnants of
sendmail and /bin/mail are gone.
I have the same home directory on several machines, but I want mail
sent to me at any of the machines which share the same home directory
to be sent to a single machine (which also has that same home
directory). With sendmail I simply put a .forward file in my single
home directory with the address I wanted all my mail sent to (again,
the address was to me at a machine on which I had this same home
directory). Once mail arrived at the desired machine, sendmail would
recognize that the .forward file contained the same address that just
received the mail and not re-forward to the same address multiple
times, but simply terminate the delivery at the address in .forward.
qmail, on the other hand, forwards the mail to the address in .qmail.
When this forwarded mail arrives, qmail sees the same .qmail file and
therefore same address and recognizes that the forwarding address is
already listed in the Delivered-To: field and rather than terminate
the delivery at that address, it bounces the message.
I realize that since I have moved my mbox to $HOME/Mailbox, this is
not really a big problem, since I can get rid of the .qmail file and
all the mail will still end up in $HOME/Mailbox. But given that my
$HOME is nfs mounted on all but one of the machines, I would like to
avoid the troubles with nfs and have all the other machines forward,
while the local machine delivers. (Unless I can be assured qmail will
not lose my mail even though my mailbox is on an nfs). Any stable
solutions would be much appreciated.
As a side note, the real problem occurs when the same address in my
.qmail file appears in the ~alias/.qmail-root (.qmail-postmaster and
.qmail-mailer-daemon forward to root). If I send a test message to
myself, it tries to deliver it, forwards it, sees the Delivered-To:,
bounces it back to me, tries to forward it, sees the Delivered-To:,
double bounces to postmaster, which gets forwards to root, which
forwards to me, which attempts to forward, can't and can't bounce! As
far as I can tell, this causes the message to be lost (if anyone knows
a way to recover such a message, I would appreciate it).
Thank you for your time.
DAVID.
~~~~~~
David J. Dooling [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept. of Chemical Engineering phone 847 467-1402
Northwestern University fax 847 491-3728
http://winnie.chem-eng.nwu.edu/students/dooling.html
