SUMMARY: sendmail MX list ...

From: Huachie Tim Lee (timothy@mail.tml.com)
Date: Mon Feb 05 1996 - 09:37:28 CST


My appreciation goes to

Claus Assmann <ca@informatik.uni-kiel.de>
Bob Reardon <bobr@cassie.Sugar-land.Wireline.SLB.COM>
Barry Margolin <barmar@bbnplanet.com>.

The information is certainly useful.
The error didn't show up for the whole past week.

My original post:
>Hello, everybody:
>
>Does anyone experience the following situation in syslog file...
>
>Jan 1 16:52:47 mail sendmail[29053]: QAA29053: from=david, size=1531,
>class=0, pri=31531, nrcpts=1,
>msgid=<Pine.SOL.3.91.960125165149.29049A-200000@mail.tml.com>,
>relay=david@localhost
>Jan 1 16:52:48 mail sendmail[29054]: QAA29053: SYSERR(david): MX list for
>abc.com.tml.com. points back to mail.tml.com
>Jan 1 16:52:48 mail sendmail[29054]: QAA29053: to=johndoes@abc.com,
>ctladdr=david (107/151), delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=smtp,
>relay=abc.com.tml.com., stat=Local configuration error
>Jan 1 16:52:48 mail sendmail[29054]: QAA29053: to=postmaster,
>delay=00:00:01, mailer=local, stat=User unknown
>
>This happened when a user "david" replied a mail from "johndoes@abc.com"
>using pine (version 3.91) and sendmail (version 8.3).
>The most wired part is this error won't happen every time.
>And if we send this mail from unix (Solaris 2.4) prompt, it works.

>From ca@mine.informatik.uni-kiel.de Sat Jan 27 11:30 EST 1996

*.tml.com. 21600 MX 100 mail.uu.net.
*.tml.com. 21600 MX 10 mail.tml.com.

Don't do that :-)
It will cause that kind of trouble if it can't find
DNS records for abc.com.

Wildcard MX records cause too many headaches...

>From bobr@cassie.Sugar-land.Wireline.SLB.COM Sat Jan 27 11:54 EST 1996

Hello,
  We have seen similar behavior - not sure whether it was the identical
problem.
  I was able to fix it by defining a w class macro that lists all of the
names by which the host on which local delivery is failing may be known.
In the list were the the host name alone, hostname.full.domain.name,
localhost, mailhost,...
The O'Reilly Nutshell book Sendmail discusses this on page 456.
  

>From barmar@bbnplanet.com Sat Jan 27 20:40 EST 1996

This is due to your wildcard MX record

*.tml.com IN MX 10 mail.tml.com.

When the SunOS sendmail looks up a destination name, it first tries it as a
name in the current domain, i.e. abc.com.tml.com. If this had failed, it
would then have tried looking up the name without the local domain suffix.
But the wildcard MX record causes the first lookup to succeed!



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