Forwarding local mail to external mail account?

[Joe Sniderman]

On 05/23/2010 04:59 PM, Matthias Brennwald wrote:
> If I try to send to a my external mail account (not through the
> forward), the mail does not arrive either. 

Ok, so the issue is with sending in general, not specific to forwarding.
Does it seem to send successfully but just never arrive, or is there a
delivery failure.  You may need to look at your logs to know for sure.

What domain is your exim sending (or trying to send) from?

Is your machine's IP listed in the SPF records for that domain?

Is the IP address your machine is using static or dynamic, and does it
have a proper reverse dns? Is it blocklisted anywhere? (If its a
dynamic/residential connection, its quite probably already blocklisted
in one or more places.  If its an open-relay its probably blocklisted.
etc)

> I cannot test if I can
> send from external sources to my local account because I don't have a
> machine at hand that could do this.

To:  you at your-domain


> How can I tell? 

Look in your log files.  This is kindof a must.

> What is MX?

Mail eXchanger.  A domain has a record or records called MX that specify
which email servers receive its email.  So, if you are sending to
so-and-so at example.com your server would need to connect to on of the
MX's for example.com.

Is your machine running on a residential connection?  Many (most
perhaps) sites will not accept mail sent directly from such a location.

In this type of situation, one option may be to use your external email
account as a smart-host, rather than forwarding.  Even if this is not
the case, the smart host option may still be a good temporary
work-around until you get the necessary setup in place to run an
internet facing email server, such as MX records, reverse DNS, things
like that.

Configure your MTA to authenticate to your external account's server,
and go from there.  I don't know if exim has this feature or not, most
MTA's do.  (I've only ever used Postfix and Sendmail, but the concepts
are the same.)

Another alternative, if you only need to be able to read your local mail
externally, but don't need to send anywhere else, would be to run a POP
or IMAP daemon locally (making sure the correct ports are reachable
externally) and have your external email account yank the messages that
way.  Many webmail providers at least have the option of pulling mail
from pop servers of other sites.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,

Joe


-- 
Joe Sniderman (joe262)      PGP: 4096R/605721CA