sendmail local-host-names questions

Gary Aitken freebsd at dreamchaser.org
Wed Aug 29 07:45:22 UTC 2012


Sorry if this is a bit off topic;
couldn't find an answer on the net anywhere and sendmail.org seems to be 
non-functional unless you're a commercial customer; 
or at least that's the way it looks to me, 
as it's redirected to sendmail.com and their "Ask the Experts" page
has no way to ask anybody anything :-)

Anyhoo...

I was setting up a virtual domain and mistakenly set my local-host-names file
to have trailing dots after the domain and host names.
This caused mail sent to the domain(s) to be bounced with the message:
  554 5.0.0 MX list for dreamchaser.org. points back to nightmare.dreamchase
r.org
  554 5.3.5 Local configuration error
Which caused me to tear my hair out (what little I have left) trying to fix
a non-existent DNS configuration error.

The maillog shows a similar message:

  Aug 28 23:10:05 nightmare sm-mta[50394]:
    q7T59w8M050394: to=ah at dreamchaser.org, delay=00:00:07, xdelay=00:00:00,
    mailer=esmtp, pri=62332, relay=dreamchaser.org., dsn=5.3.5,
    stat=Local configuration error 
  Aug 28 23:10:05 nightmare sm-mta[50394]: q7T59w8M050394: q7T59w8N050394:
    return to sender: Local configuration error
  Aug 28 23:10:05 nightmare sm-mta[50394]: q7T59w8N050394: to=ah at dreamchaser.org,
    delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=esmtp, pri=33356, 
    relay=dreamchaser.org., dsn=5.3.5, stat=Local configuration error
  Aug 28 23:10:05 nightmare sm-mta[50394]: q7T59w8M050394:
    Losing ./qfq7T59w8M050394: savemail panic
  Aug 28 23:10:05 nightmare sm-mta[50394]: q7T59w8M050394: SYSERR(root): 
    savemail: cannot save rejected email anywhere
  
Can anyone explain what's going on or point me to a better place to ask?
It's now fixed but I'd like to understand why sendmail doesn't like a domain
specified with a trailing dot, since I thought that was how one specified a 
fully qualified domain name.

Also...  I can't find anything about how to put a comment in the 
local-host-names file.  I took a guess and used # as in the .mc file,
and it doesn't seem to cause errors; but neither does ';' or '%' so I'm
guessing the lines are just being skipped because they don't parse properly.
I'd like to know whether comments are allowed or not; and if so, 
what the proper syntax is.

Thanks for any hints,

Gary


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