First of all. THANK YOU for any help you might be able to provide.

I have a really wigged out sendmail configuration.
I work on a ship. The ship has a domain name of ship.domain.xxx

Our normal domain is domain.xxx (as an example).

What we have now is a sendmail box that is masquerading as the ship. All mail comes into the sendmail box and gets queued. We then have a perl script that harvests everything in the queue and puts it into a ZIP file in a directory that is accessible to a modem system over a satellite.

Three times a day the ship calls up over the satellite and does a transfer where it grabs the bundles our server has been making and it puts bundles that have been made on the ship in a queue on the server in the office.

Then every 8 minutes our perl script run and un-zips the bundles and puts them in the appropriate sendmail queues. The sendmail does its thing and people get mail.

make sense??

All this works and has worked for years.

Here is the problem.
The ship is gonna get moth-balled for awhile and I need to configure sendmail to bounce all but a few accounts. Those few accounts that do not get bounced need to be aliased to other accounts on another server.

I am not sure how to do this for various reasons. The first and most obvious (to me) is that my sendmail server here in the office is just a relay and has NO idea what accounts are valid at the final destination and what are not. (so how would it know what to bounce anyway)

I think I should be able to set up some kind of table that contains the names things I want forwarded and then tell it to bounce everything else. But I am not sure what table that would be.

Anyway.
Any ideas will be appreciated. I will be here reading the book for many days I expect.

Thanks

Hi,

The local-host-names contain your local domain name what is not forwarded anywhere else. Eg.: local mail communication and internet communication on the same box.

The mailertable contain the forwarded domains. Eg.: The emails come from internet into linux box then filtered spams then go to local Exchange server or another local sendmail box.

The virtusertable contain the multiple domain / multiple user configuration. I think this is for you.

Eg.:

chris@linux.com chris
cnegus@linux.com chris
info@linux.com info-linux
info@mybox.com info-mybox

@domain1.com domain1
@domain2.com %1@linux.com

Or you can forward with .forward file too.

If you use the .forward file you have to put this into sendmail.mc file.:

confDONT_BLAME_SENDMAIL

Or another possibility to forward mails to different account is the aliases file.

Eg.:

info-list: chris, tweeks, myadminbox@mydomain.com

It means the info-list@domain.com will be delivered to all that accounts. (the domain.com is in the local-host-name file)

I hope it helped.

Laz

You can also look at establishing a ./forward file in each users home directory. Sendmail will see the file and forward it to the email address that you list in there. I have several recipients that get mail at my server but don't pop their mail from here. So I just set them up the ./forward file and sendmail sends it out. This is all depending on the aliases file too. Make sure and change that appropriately.

Hope this helps!

Thank you both for your time and your ideas.
I think I need to pursue the virtusertable thing.

huckinstein

You are welcome mate!

I hope it helped.

Laz