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