On 05.10.23 01:59, Chris Siebenmann via Exim-users wrote:
>>> So for me, the exim email system on the desktop computers is
>>> exclusively used by the Linux operating system. I do not enable
>>> incoming email, so all mails are generated by the various services
>>> that come with Linux. Some of these services are operated
>>> intentionally by me, like logcheck and monit. But some are just
>>> basic system services that tend to report relevant information via
>>> email, often to root.
>>
>> As I suspected, you're sensibly trying to be able to tell at a glance
>> which machine a message is from. This use-case is the main purpose of
>> the address rewritng proposed in the Postfix null-client guide in the
>> MULTI_INSTANCE doc.
>
> Another, much more brute force way (if you don't have a common
> /etc/passwd file that's somehow distributed around) is to change the
> /etc/passwd GECOS field for relevant accounts to have the machine's name
> in it. This assumes you have a limited number of such accounts and that
> your machine names are fixed (you don't rename them around), but it's
> very light-weight and easy.
>
> We do this (for root) with:
> chfn -f "$(hostname) root" root
>
> It wouldn't be hard to do this for a list of system logins, especially
> if you didn't care greatly about duplicating their current GECOS values.
>
> This has been quite handy to tell at a glance what important system is
> sending us root email for some reason, without having to look at the
> Received: headers or hope that whatever generated the email put the
> hostname in the Subject:.
This is actually also a pretty nice idea, I will also test that. We have
quite a limited number of users so it should not be too hard to test.
Thanks for the suggestion!
All the best,
Mario
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