Sendmail Problems with Aliases

[Laurie_2]

Hi All,

This just started happening
this week. Everything worked
fine before Monday.

Now...
When my unix users (HP-UX 11.0) send email to an aliases
i.e. "finaid" and it goes
to everyone on unix email but
not those users with a .forward file to Outlook.

Here is the error message they
get:

451 baduser@mail.bigcomputer.edu...mail.bigcomputer.edu ...mail.bigcomputer.edu: Name server timeout

Looking at the mailq:
baduser (host map: lookup (mail.bigcomputer.edu): deferred)
baduser@mail.bigcomputer.edu

I can fix the problem if I
go into the /etc/mail/aliases
file and type out the Outlook
full email for those folks
in aliases.

How come I have to do this?
It seems like a relay issue.

I can email directly from
unix to baduser and it forwards it to their Outlook,
it's only an aliases thing.
But we have lots of aliases
and hundreds of users who forward their email and this
would be alot of work for me
to fix this.

Help,
Laurie

[Shannon Petry]

Your error tells a big tale. The name server you have specified is not responding, causing some sendmail problems.

Next, if your sending to outlook is this a different mail server? If so, aliases expansion only works for inbound mail. It get's messy trying to put .forwards in some peoples files after an alias expansion and sending to different servers.

How exactly is the configuration?


Regards,
Shannon

[Laurie_2]

In answer to your question:

The baduser is inbound her .foward file says:

baduser@mail.bigcomputer.edu

But the problem is happening for any .forward file whether on the same server (bigcomputer) or not.

Laurie

[Helen French]

Hi Laurie:

Did you install any sendmail patches recently ? If yes, then you need to move the files from /usr/newconfig/etc to the /etc/mail directory and edit it.

HTH,
Shiju

[Shannon Petry]

Lets try and limit the possibilities like so:

Does this fail also for user@ip?
To test this, the alias should simply expand on the local host.
* If this works then fix the name server in /etc/resolv.conf

Next, after changing aliases, did you run "newalias"?

As someone else mentioned, did you apply patches? If so, then ensure that sendmail.cf allows forwards, and that sendmail.cw allows relay to the other mail servers, including itself.

Shannon

[Laurie_2]

I didn't do any patches.

If I hard code the emails
(inbound and outbound) in
the aliases I believe it works fine.

aliases:
finaid laurie@mail.bigcomputer.edu,
terry@hotmail.com, etc.

I think the problem was due
to a virsus last week, our
network person did something
to the relay, but I'm not
sure. Shouldn't mailq be
empty if there are no problems?

Laurie