Any sendmail gurus on my Friends list?

[annathepiper]

Okay, I'm having interesting sendmail problems and before I mess with anything in any detail, I want to have some input from someone with a clue. Short form of the problem: it seems that domains hosted on murkworks.net are not currently accepting email from off-site sources, and I need to fix this in a clueful fashion.


One of our users has an account with us and her own domain. She can receive normal email at her normal address. Her domain is also up and running, and answering pings and suchlike, and pointing at the correct server.

She has asked me to set up an alias for her usual account name, so that she can receive email that goes to the aliased named at her personal domain. I did this--the alias is in our /etc/aliases file. Test email sent to it from my own machine on our network worked.

However, when I try to email her alias at her domain name from offsite, I get the following error message (I have changed her actual email address and domain name to fake ones, for purposes of this exercise):

   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<alias@example.com>
    (reason: 550 relaying to <alias@example.com> prohibited by administrator)

   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to example.com.:
>>> DATA
<<< 550 relaying to <alias@example.com> prohibited by administrator
550 5.1.1 <alias@example.com>... User unknown
<<< 503 Valid RCPT TO  must precede DATA

Any hints, folks? I have experimentally also tried to email my own address, piper, at other domains hosted by us which should in theory go ahead and send mail on through to me. That didn't work either; I got similar error messages. So this does not appear to be a domain-specific problem.

Comments

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

need to tell your mailserver it's allowed to relay to that domain, I suspect.

If this really is sendmail, not exim, I can't help :)

[annathepiper]

This is in fact sendmail. :) Thanks anyway!

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

The answer is essentially correct. While I think if the machine in question was in front of me I could probably hack the cf, these days things are configured in m4. Let's see... what's the proper spell these days:

http://www.sendmail.org/faq/section3.html#3.27

Turns out the m4 would have just selected the proper file or hash-db. See if this does the trick.

[annathepiper]

Thanks! Though solarbird pointed out what she thinks the actual problem is--the domain name for this particular user of ours was pointing at the web server for both web functions AND mail, and that server doesn't DO mail.

So I had to tweak stuff to make sure that the domain actually sends web and mail stuff to the right respective places.

But thanks for chiming in! :)