[Exim] Re: Problem with exim on internal network

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Author: Christian Schmidt
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: [Exim] Re: Problem with exim on internal network
Hello syn,

syn uw, 03.01.2004 (d.m.y):

> We are running EXIM on Linux on an internal web server running on a internal
> private network (hidden by NAT). EXIM is only responsible for sending out
> mails from our webmail system. The problem that we are encountering is when
> we are sending mails to domains that are hosted on our server: EXIM does an
> MX lookup for a domain hosted on our servers and then gets the external IP
> address of that our server and not the internal address. I tryed to force
> this by entering our mail server host's internal IP in /etc/hosts but still
> it takes the external address.


Yes, that's because the DNS lookup is done by exim: exim does _not_
only aks for the A record of your email server (its IP address).
What exim asks for is (probably) the MX record, i.e. your MTA wants to
know which server the DNS considers as your domain's Mail Exchanger
(MX).

> Thus mails get undelivered as from the
> internal network it's not posible to use external IP addresses (that's how
> our OpenBSD firewall works).
>
> Does anyone have an idea ?


Just define an additional router in your exim.conf that redirects mail
to <anyone@???> just to the corresponding machine.

Just take a closer look at the exim specs, all you need is mentioned
there.

Regards,
Christian