Jacob Rau wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm digging everywhere and racking my brain, and not getting anywhere.
>
> I have exim set up on Debian to send all email through my GMail account
> as a smarthost. It works. However, any pieces of mail addressed to root
> are sent to root@the domain I set in the "dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config"
> setup. (I know this because cron is crapping out every 20 minutes. I
> will figure that out later). Since root@??? doesn't exist, I got a
> wad of undeliverable messages. After that, I changed the domain to be
> jacobarau.com but expect several more undeliverables, as the firewall
> doesn't have a rule for mail.
>
> I learned from many sources that I could edit /etc/aliases. And I did.
>
> #
> # Mail aliases for sendmail
> #
> # You must run newaliases(1) after making changes to this file.
> #
>
> # Required aliases
> postmaster: jacob.rau@???
> MAILER-DAEMON: jacob.rau@???
>
> # Common aliases
> abuse: jacob.rau@???
> spam: jacob.rau@???
>
> # Other aliases
> root: jacob.rau@???
>
> That's the contents of my /etc/aliases. I ran newaliases both as me and
> as root, just to be sure it wasn't sensitive to who runs it. And still,
> email that is to be sent to root is sent to root@domain, completely
> ignoring my /etc/aliases.
>
> Any new ideas? /etc/aliases has no effect whatsoever, despite the
> leagues of people on mailing lists vouching for it.
>
> Jacob Rau
>
Obvious, but perhhaps overlooked items:
- Exim's ~/configure file router/transport section must actually be
seeking to *utilize* /etc/aliases.
It does so by default, but does *yours* do so?
... AND do so BEFORE encountering another router that beleives it knows
what to do with the addressee in question?
- 'All will be revealed' with Exim's extensive built-in debugging
facility. The one I'd try first is a simple routing test:
exim -bt root@<domain>.<tld>
Further - as root is a 'fixed never user' and you may be directly
logged-in as root on an insecure system, or su'ed to root more often
(wherein Exim 'see's your real UID, not your EUID) 'root' is not the
best identity to use for general-purpose testing.
Suggest adding non-root test users to /etc/aliases, as in:
test.remote: <a valid off-box address>
test.local: <a valid on-box address>
test.reject: <an *invalid* on-box address>
HTH,
Bill
