[ On Thu, January 8, 1998 at 23:08:43 (-0800), Keith McCallion wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [EXIM] Hrm.
>
> I think you misunderstood, or looked at the error without reading the
> first paragraph. =) They are pointing their MX records to the machine by
> IP address, *not* by a hostname. This is obviously not standard (I have
> never seen anyone do this), and Exim does not like it, and thus reports
> the hosts are non-existant.
Real examples are worth a million words! Please do embarass them.
Never the less, what they are doing is flatly illegal in the DNS. As I
said, they obviously don't care if anyone can send them any mail. About
once a year or so it seems some fool does this and has to be educated by
public embarassment. Exim's error message is correct -- none of their
MX targets are valid hosts.
I don't remember exactly how to do this in Exim, but you can probably
rewrite their addresses as I suggested -- i.e. rewrite them to a known
literal. Of course if they change their address you'd have to change
your rewrite rule, but anything you do will require manual
I guess a rewrite rule like this is not really any different or better
than making your local nameserver authoritative for their zone so that
when exim tries to send mail it'll get your version, not theirs. In
fact this scheme is probably better if you can automate a zone transfer
from their true authoritative zone and filter it to correct their
errors.
Hacks, all hacks, though.
--
Greg A. Woods
+1 416 443-1734 VE3TCP <gwoods@???> <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@???>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@???>
--
*** Exim information can be found at
http://www.exim.org/ ***
