sendmail

Paul Howarth paul at city-fan.org
Mon May 23 10:29:58 UTC 2005


Shahzad Chohan wrote:

(top-posting reordered)

 > On 5/23/05, Paul Howarth <paul at city-fan.org> wrote:
 >
 >>Shahzad Chohan wrote:
 >>
 >>>I was wondering if someone could help me figure out an odd behaviour
 >>>in sendmail. Basically
 >>>I have a lot of messages from example.com with lots of reciepients
 >>>some are to us some aren't. When clearing out the mailq for all emails
 >>>matching example.com I get errors with can't find dns entries for
 >>>foo.com, even though foo.com has nothing to do with us. Is there a
 >>>reason why its trying to deliver mail to reciepients that don't belong
 >>>to us, even though the original sender of the mail sent the mail to
 >>>us?
 >>
 >>Most likely the references to foo.com are in the To: or Cc: headers of
 >>the email, and that is what sendmail is warning you about. You can see
 >>the actual recipients that sendmail is trying to deliver to using 
"mailq".
 >>
 >
> Hi
> 
> Thanks for the reply. 
> 
> The thing is that even if they are in the To or CC, whoever sent us
> the mail they should be the one's delivering it to foo.com, not us. We
> weren't the initial senders of the mail, we were the receivers so
> sendmail should not look up there DNS enteries. Any ideas on that or
> am I missing something obvious from your reply.

sendmail processes headers during the delivery process, in case it needs 
to rewrite any of them (e.g. for masquerading). It is in this process 
that it is coming across foo.com; it is not trying to deliver mail to or 
from foo.com. If you use the "mailq" command you'll see the actual 
envelope sender and recipient addresses that sendmail is dealing with, 
and I doubt that any foo.com addresses will appear there.

P.S. Please don't top-post on this mailing list.

Paul.




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