getting mail to work

[Jeffrey Goldberg]

[mailed and posted]

On Mar 11, 2007, at 10:36 PM, Ed Zwart wrote:

> I'm still a little fuzzy on legal entries for hostname and domain.  I
> set them to be mine, and it worked, and then for kicks, set it to
> google.com, and that worked too.  I looked at the headers, and can see
> that the source can be traced back to my machine, but that still seems
> kind of easy to spoof.

It is extremely easy to spoof, but google has taken steps to make it  
easy for mail servers to detect if mail is spoofed.  So if you send  
mail from "google.com" without it coming from your network, than any  
server making use of SPF (Sender Policy Framewokr) would immediately  
identify it as a spoof, and will be blocked.

To learn more about this system, see

  http://www.openspf.org/


> Anyway, it's not something I'm overly worried
> about; I'm just not clear on what I SHOULD be using for hostname and
> domain.

Well, what is a hostname for the machine that is sending the mail.   
Since you are now going through your ISPs mailserver, it doesn't need  
to be a hostname that can be looked up.  So something like

    mailout.my.dom.ain

should do fine.  Use your real domain for the my.dom.ain part.  The  
more correct information you provide, the less mail from your system  
will look like spam. But even "localhost.local" would be OK (though a  
useful domain name would be better). Using "google.com" would make it  
look like you are up to no good.

-j




-- 
Jeffrey Goldberg                        http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/