On 25 Oct 2008, at 17:01, Charles Darwin wrote:
...
In layman terms, what do mydomain and relayhost stand for? I am
running 9.5.0 Darwin (think BSD) and I would like to setup my
postfix to send messages to other machines on my network and/or over
the Internet.
In your case, from the headers of your email, mydomain is dsl.bell.ca
Your "myhostname" would be bas2-montreal45-1279494405.dsl.bell.ca,
although you would probably JUST use relayhost and ignore these
settings.
I don't really know how to explain the domain stuff better - if you're
really using just 9.5.0 Darwin then I'm surprised it's not obvious.
If you're using a Mac then just say so - that way we'll know (if you
ask more questions) to take account of your package management system
and that you're liable to be running a version of postfix which is a
little out of date.
I'm going to assume you are using a Mac & recommend these resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_Name_System
and also the first couple of chapters of O'Reilly's "DNS and BIND" by
Liu & Albitz. I found this explanation of the workings of DNS
delegation and lower-level domains to be excellent, enlightening and
surely a joy to read for any person with the least technological
curiosity. Older editions of this book may be out of date with respect
to the mechanics of the BIND software, but are available very cheaply
indeed and are surely worth a punt just for this delightful overview.
Setting relayhost in main.cf will tell postfix "always send my mail
via this other server", and one might commonly use it to send mail via
one's ISP's SMTP server.
I'm not sure your purpose in sending messages to other machines on
your network - usually an email program (like Outlook, Apple Mail or
Thunderbird) will get its messages from a POP3 or IMAP server (of
which one would typically have one on a small network) and not
"directly" via postfix.
Stroller.
