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Re: multilog-watch, qmail-remote, and "Sorry. Although I'm listed as a b

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Subject: Re: multilog-watch, qmail-remote, and "Sorry. Although I'm listed as a best-preference..."
From: Kyle Wheeler <kyle-qmail@memoryhole.net>
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2007 11:31:52 -0600
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On Tuesday, June  5 at 12:57 PM, quoth Dave Sill:
You really don't want the circumstances that make it work, though; if qmail-remote is willing to deliver to itself, you can get mail loops if somebody sends mail to a domain that is pointed to your IP address but your mail server doesn't recognize as local.

But qmail-send makes that determination, not qmail-remote.

Right. For example:

1. I send you a message to doesnotexist@sws5.ornl.gov

2. The return address is foo@fooldave.memoryhole.net
3. Now, let's just say fooldave.memoryhole.net resolves to 160.91.218.105 (and has no MX record).

Since doesnotexist@sws5.ornl.gov is at your domain, qmail-smtpd will accept it into your queue. The recipient doesn't exist, so qmail-send will queue a bounce message to foo@fooldave.memoryhole.net. Since fooldave.memoryhole.net is certainly *not* in your control/locals, qmail-send determines that the address is remote. It feeds that to qmail-remote, which then (assuming it didn't check) contacts YOUR server to send the bounce. Now, let's just say you've added a line like this to your /etc/tcp.smtp file:

    160.91.216-219.:allow,RELAYCLIENT=""

So your qmail-smtpd is going to accept *anything* from within your network, which means it's going to accept whatever your qmail-remote feeds to it (since it's sending from an IP within your network). Which means that the bounce message is going to go right back into your queue, and is going to be fed to qmail-remote again (because foo@fooldave.memoryhole.net still isn't in control/locals), and round and round it goes.

I don't know why Russ used qmail-remote.

According to his web-page:

    The e-mail is sent using qmail-remote directly, which requires
    qmail to be installed on the system but which allows mail to be
    sent even if the local mail system is down.

It really only helps if the local qmail-send isn't *running*; there are plenty of circumstances where using qmail-remote directly doesn't *help* (e.g. if smtproutes is borked). So... that may not be the best reasoning in the world, but it certainly is *simple*.

Since that's his reasoning, it's fairly obvious that he only intends you to be delivering to non-local addresses (delivering to a local address doesn't work if the local mail system is down, unless you use qmail-local directly, which would require him to reimplement support for virtualdomains, users/assign, and all the other things that qmail-local doesn't do itself (and presumes that the local configs are set up correctly)).

I also don't know why it worked fine on two systems for years and broke recently on both due to some change I haven't been able to track down. I've got a workaround so it's just a puzzle at this point.

Indeed; though as he said, any circumstance where using qmail-remote to deliver to a local address *works* is technically broken, which may make it hard to track down (i.e. "how did my machine used to be misbehaving without my knowledge?").

~Kyle
--
Despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, I have not yet been able to answer the great question that has never been answered: What does a woman want?
                                                      -- Sigmund Freud

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