Russell Nelson wrote:
> Bela Lubkin writes:
> > Assuming qmail has been set up on a bastion host and is being used to
> > route incoming mail from the Internet to various internal hosts;
> >
> > and observing that in doing such routing, it is not honoring the
> > "user-token@domain" address extension delimiter;
> >
> > then: what mistake has been made in configuring the bastion host?
>
> Hard to say. There are so many mistakes you could have made. If you
> were a clueless luser, I'd suggest that you failed to create
> ~alias/.qmail-token (from the example above) or put the wrong thing in
> it. But you're not, and you didn't, therefore you must have done
> something spectacularly wrong, rather than mildly and boringly wrong.
Well, thank you for the vote of confidence. ;-}
I must not have been clear enough in my initial posts: I did not
configure qmail on our bastion host. I do not even have _access_ to the
bastion host, to determine how it is configured. Essentially the only
tool I have is to probe it with attempted emails.
I'm trying to solve this problem from the outside, because I know the
people in charge of the server are extremely overworked and won't want
to hear about my problems. I would rather present them with a complete
(and hopefully simple) _solution_, rather than a mystery they have to
figure out.
> Pray, tell us what it was when you figure it out.
It isn't looking like that's going to happen.
Apply what I've said to what you've said:
- Since I don't have access to the bastion host, I have no idea what is
in ~alias/.qmail-token, or indeed whether that exists at all.
- If you're referring to configuration on the internal mailhosts (to
which the bastion host forwards), I remind you that (1) they aren't
running qmail, and (2) the probe messages I've sent bounce off the
bastion host, not the next hop, so mailhost configuration isn't actually
relevant at all (at this stage of the game). It becomes relevant when
the qmail bastion host starts forwarding user-token messages -- _then_ I
need to figure out either how to get qmail to forward user=token
messages, or MMDF (on the mailhosts) to correctly receive user-token.
> > Furthermore: once that's been fixed, is there a way to also get it to
> > honor "=" as a similar address extension delimiter -- without setting up
> > thousands of individual wildcard aliases?
>
> man qmail-users
> should tell you how to set up multiple instances of each user, each
> with his own delimiter. I tend not to like qmail-users because I
> (still!) have more experience with hosts where a user in /etc/passwd
> can receive email, damnit.
qmail-users _might_ be how they've configured the bastion host to
forward mail internally. Maybe that would be a good thing -- it would
imply that they have a script which converts from our internal alias
file format to qmail-users format, and which could be modified to add
extra lines to forward wildcard user[-=.+]token addresses. I have this
horrible feeling that they might have a _hand-edited_ qmail-users file;
in which case, any request to complexify its format would be summarily
rejected.
I guess I'm going to have to actually find out who maintains the qmail
configuration. Once I do that, a clock starts ticking on how much
patience they'll have for showing me how they've configured it, before
they decide it's not worth the hassle. :-(
>Bela<
