Toralf Lund wrote:
> We usually configure our MUAs to send e-mail via SMTP to localhost,
> where Exim is running. This results in a header of the form:
>
> Received: from localhost.localdomain ([127.0.0.1] helo=mydomain)
> by myhost.mydomain with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1)
> id 1AdWvu-0005ks-00
> for user@domain; Mon, 05 Jan 2004 16:46:22 +0100
>
>
> Now, this seems to cause problems with some blacklists etc. on the net;
> apparently they think "localhost" is evil.
[ ... ]
OK. Thanks for all the response. The consensus of it all seems to be
that the "localhost" entries shouldn't cause problems as a sane setup
won't reject messages based on these alone, and most MTAs will in any
case just check the connecting server, not the originating host (unless
it connects directly) or intermediate relays.
That's what I wanted to hear, of course. I got a bit worried, and, I
guess, drew the wrong conclusions because:
1. A while back, messages internal to our domain started getting
blocked, and the reason given was that 127.0.0.1 was an open
relay, because the Exim was mistakenly set up to also do RBL check
on outgoing mail, and test all hosts, including localhost. Note
that this misconfiguration existed for a *long* time before the
problem started occuring.
2. My post to a mailing list started getting inexplicably lost just
after that (so I thought the list server might have classified
them as spam for the same reason.)
3. Someone mentioned having a message bounced, and thought it
happened because it was sent via localhost. They may have been
wrong, though, and I haven't got the error message, so I can't
check now.
- Toralf
