/etc/mailname and cron

[Derek Broughton]

tony B wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-04-27 at 08:15 +0100, Tony Arnold wrote:
> 
>> /etc/mailname should contain the fully qualified domain name of your
>> machine and not localhost.localdomain. I think mail uses mainly when
>> sending messages to form the from field in outgoing messages. It may
>> also use it for incoming so that the system know for which domains it is
>> meant to receive mail for.
> 
> I'm running Hoary on an old Mac, and that's what it has is mailname, so
> that's what I used here.  (BTW, I forgot to mention that I'm running an
> up-to-date Dapper.)  My hostname is aurora; what do I use for a domain?
> 
It's _supposed_ to be a valid domain, such that anything that gets sent to
it routes back to you - if you don't actually have a valid domain, you
probably shouldn't be running an SMTP server (at least one with connections
to the outside world), but rather using your ISPs server.

The really important thing, though, is that your SMTP server not be
configured to send anything addressed to the local domain out to the wide
world.

E.G., I use masqmail for SMTP on my machine othello.pointerstop.ca.  It is
configured such that all mail to pointerstop.ca is considered local (except
for a couple of addresses specified as exceptions, which route to the
pointerstop.ca host).  Most servers have similar options.  So when I
generate mail to either "root at localhost" or "root at pointerstop.ca" it can
not send mail to my ISP.
-- 
derek