Configure senmail to see the mail account.

[Carme Torca]

How could I configure the sendmail to known the mail account xxx@yyy.com that send the mail??
Actually I can see the final user (to), but not the origin (from.

Thanks a lot of,
Carmen.

[Matti_Kurkela]

By default, sendmail has two main methods:

- If the destination address matches to a local user (= hostname is yyy.com and user xxx exists), deliver to mailbox file located at /var/mail/

- If the host part of the address (= @yyy.com) does not refer to the local host, use DNS to figure out where the mail should be sent to.
This is more complex than the basic "what's the IP address of this hostname?" query: the DNS data can contain "MX" records which can say things like "the mail to yyy.com should be delivered primarily to server1.yyy.com, but if it does not answer, then use server2.yyy.com".

Other delivery methods can be installed, if necessary.

To identify a problem with email delivery to xxx@yyy.com, at least the following information is needed:

1.) Are you configuring the host that is known to the email world as "yyy.com" or some other host?

2.) Does the host itself know that its (email) domainname is "yyy.com" and it should be receiving email for that domain?
- check /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/nsswitch.conf

3.) Is there any indication in the mail log that a delivery attempt was made?
- check /var/adm/syslog/mail.log
- if there is nothing at all related to the missing mail, the connection from the sending host is not reaching your host: investigate the problem with your network administrators, there may be a firewall mis-configuration.
- there is usually several log messages per email: they can be identified by the "queue ID" field of the log message.

4.) Did the sender of the email get an automatic reply saying that the mail could not be delivered? If so, it usually contains some technical information that can be very useful in tracking down the exact problem.

MK