How to get mail to local destinations delivered?

[Chris G]

On Sun, Nov 11, 2007 at 01:53:29PM +0100, Gijs wrote:
> 
> 
>    You can send root's mail to a user like so (in /etc/aliases):
>    root: chris
>    But if you really want mail to get delivered to an emailaddress
>    without going through the internet, you'll have to setup your own
>    pop3/imap server, along with corresponding domain-setups (like John
>    already mentioned before). But is it really that big of a problem to
>    go through all this hassle? Setting your email address in the aliases
>    file does mean its a long round trip for the email, but in the end the
>    mail does get delivered to the correct person.
> 
No, no, no, no, no, no!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That's the MS/Windows/PC view of the world!  :-)

On a (proper) unix system mail arrives in the user's mail spool file,
typically /var/mail/<username> and sensible mail clients know how to
get it from there (e.g. 'mail', 'mailx', 'mutt').

sendmail knows that *local* mail is delivered to the mail spool.

In fact I have found that sendmail thinks this system is called
isbd.net and thus mail sent to chris at isbd.net gets put into the file
/var/mail/chris by sendmail.  Thus I have put:-

    root:       chris at isbd.net

at the end of /etc/aliases and all is now OK.


What I *don't* quite understand is why sendmail thinks this is
isbd.net and why I couldn't tell it what the system should really be
called.  Everything else (apache, ssh, etc.) thinks it's called
home.isbd.net.

-- 
Chris Green