Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!rutgers!orstcs!mist!hakanson
From: hakanson@mist.cs.orst.edu (Marion Hakanson)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: MX records and gateways
Message-ID: <5982@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU>
Date: 10 Aug 88 16:49:52 GMT
References: <452@umn-d-ub.D.UMN.EDU> <15002@oddjob.UChicago.EDU>
Sender: netnews@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU
Reply-To: hakanson@mist.UUCP (Marion Hakanson)
Organization: Oregon State University - CS - Corvallis, Oregon
Lines: 24

In article <15002@oddjob.UChicago.EDU> matt@oddjob.UChicago.EDU (My Name Here) writes:
>. . .
>As long as you define MXDOMAIN, I think your sendmail is going to do
>the right thing.  The MX stuff just doesn't happen where "-bt -dxx.yy"
>will show it.
>				Matt Crawford

Matt's right, sendmail does do what you want, even though it looks
like it's trying to connect to the host itself (it's the tcp mailer
in this case, not necessarily a TCP connection, BTW).  In some other
newsgroup recently, we were discussing the other bad effects this
invisible approach can cause -- if one of the MX hosts does not
have a host number, for example, sendmail says "host unknown" but
with the name of the destination host, not the MX host.  The only
way to diagnose this kind of problem is to use nslookup to simulate
what sendmail would be trying to do (look up A records for the hosts
in the MX records, basically).

The invisible, transparent behavior is nice when it works, but let's
have some better diagnostics for MX stuff in sendmail 5.60, please?

-- 
Marion Hakanson         Domain: hakanson@cs.orst.edu
                        UUCP  : {hp-pcd,tektronix}!orstcs!hakanson