How to get mail to local destinations delivered?

[Chris G]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 03:25:19PM +1030, Tim wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 19:24 +0000, Chris G wrote:
> > Ah, I'm beginning to understand, mail to 'chris' and 'root' works, but
> > sendmail would appear to add a hostname to what's sent by an MUA and
> > anything with a hostname after the username is sent out, which doesn't
> > work. 
> 
> Hmm, this sounds familiar.  Somewhere along the line of setting up
> networking on one of my boxes, it got a FQDN set where there should just
> be a hostname.  Then sendmail was adding the domain name onto the end of
> that.  Naturally, this didn't work.  And I got some peculiar error
> messages.
> 
> e.g. What happened:
>      my intended hostname:  machine
>      my intended domain name:  example.com
> 
>      actual hostname:  machine.example.com
>      actual domain name:  example.com
> 
>      Services making up a FQDN from the given information, came up
>      with:  machine.example.com.example.com
> 
Yes, I'm pretty sure that's *exactly* my problem.

My MUA (mutt) allows one to set the hostname for mail sent to 'name
only' users.  I had (probably naively given all these problems!) set
the hostname in mutt to home.isbd.net.

If I *don't* set the hostname in mutt and send a mail to 'chris' then
(looking in maillog etc.) it appears that sendmail is appending a
hostname of home.home and the mail gets sent to chris at home.home.

I think the main issue is that very few "linux at home on the desktop"
systems are set up to work as a proper domain on the internet with A
records, MX records etc. and even fewer are set up like mine as a
domain on the internet but *not* for E-Mail.

-- 
Chris Green