[cobalt-users] RE: Pop before SMTP - I've had enough.

[Charlie Summers <charlie@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 7:14 PM -0500 3/29/02, Benedict is rumored to have typed:

> Another one that does not get it.

   Er, you might consider lightening up; people are trying to help you, and
they'll stop trying right quick if you start to snap at 'em.

> This error-warning should NOT be going to the sender of the email,
> not even when his mail apparently bounced back.

   Of course it should, since this is likely a misconfiguration on your part
(not you personally, but your machine) causing sendmail to think the sender
is attempting a third-party relay. I'm betting you're only seeing the problem
to one domain, or sub-domain.

   Let's assume your machine holds domain.tld (or at least you THINK it
does). Now let's assume you have a misconfiguration, and your sendmail is NOT
set up to accept mail for the domain.tld domain even though your DNS is set
so that your machine is the primary Mail eXchanger (MX) for domain.tld. Now
let's say I send mail to joe@xxxxxxxxxx - my server will look up the MX
record for domain.tld, find your machine, and make an SMTP connection to it -
but your machine's sendmail will treat my conection to your machine as if I
were trying to relay mail _outside_ (remember, your sendmail in this
hypothetical is not accepting mail for domain.tld, so it appears to your
machine like my SMTP server is attempting to relay _through_ it to an
_outside_ machine that handles mail for domain.tld), and so would tell me to
check mail first (since that's now the default error for an illegal relay
condition, which to your sendmail it IS; it's an attempt to deliver to a
non-local machine, and only validated users can do that).

   So that error is _completely_ understandable (reasonable, even), assuming
that you have a misconfiguiration, and the domain throwing the error very
likely isn't listed in /etc/sendmail.cw (which contains, "names of hosts for
which we receive email" in 8.9.3; could be elsewhere for later versions, but
I didn't notice which Cobalt you're seeing the error on), and is thus
considered BY SENDMAIL (regardless of your DNS) to be non-local.

         Charlie