My original question was:
Does anyone have experience of setting up sendmail on an Alpha server
OSF/1 3.0) to interface with a Microsoft Mail SMTP gateway?
Basically, the Alpha server acts as the local mail host, accessing the
Internet via a router, relaying mail to and from the Microsoft Mail host.
The Microsoft Mail host has two post offices (because we have exceeded
the maximum number of recipients - 500 only per post office).
The outside world should not care about which post office to address -
the sender should see just one domain - and we should do the forwarding
to the correct post office. However, each post office has a name called
for instance "po1.ms" and "po2.ms".
I have set up BIND on the Alpha server, but BIND does not accept this
syntax when looking up a host name seperated by a full stop.
Does one have to change the names of the Microsoft Mail postoffices in
order to get this working?
A few hints would be appreciated from someone who has experience from
the same kind of setup.
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>From Eric Bennett I received the following:
> I have been running a similar setup to yours for about one year. One thing
> that you may have to do here is to include the po name in your internet
> addressing scheme. When you configure sendmail you have a choice early on in
> the setup script to address the mail from your dns or smarthost (which would
> give you an internet addressing scheme of user@po.domain) or have a
> hub,running unix, perform delivery(which would give you the scheme of
> user@domain). I believe this is explained in chapter 9 of the Network
> Configuration manual for DEC OSF/1.
>
> Msoft mail po's dont run under unix and there fore cannot function as
> sendmail hubs. I had to include the po names in my sites email address and
> if I had it all to do over again, I would have invested in a few unix boxes
> to act as mailhubs so that I could use the user@domain addressing scheme.
> The unix hubs will interface with ANY mail front end(msoft, notes, etc) and
> the central admin of your email system is easier to handle.
And from Arun Sanghvi the following:
> How about using aliases?
And from Dave Thomson the following:
> Sort of. We have several unix machines here (of which 2 are alphas) which
> access the MS SMTP gateway to send mail to the MS mail system. The Alpha is
> not the local mail host but the differences on the unix side are miniscule
> between os's. We have about 12 MS Mail postoffices using the gateway.
> This is our situation except a linux box acts as the local mail host and
> also routes mail from our other unix boxes both to the internet and each
> other.
> Chant the following mantra three times before doing anything "Microsoft Mail
> is Braindead". It will make you feel better and help you understand the
> problem.
> MS MAil does not have the concept of domains - each postoffice is separate
> and distinct. You can get the postoffices to automatically forward mail
> messages between each other as required. This does not allow for you to
> have one MS Mail domain and for MS mail to work out which postoffice to
> handle.
> One of your postoffices should be setup with the gateway component . This
> is the one that the unix host will talk to. The other postoffice should be
> setup as a downstream postoffice and point to the first postoffice for SMTP
> mail.
> You will need to add some entries to the sendmail.cf file to tell sendmail
> to route messages to the smtp gateway. I won't bother discribing here but
> can if you wish. This will setup two subdomains for your mail. For
> example, my mail address (thomsond@wellington.ecnz.co.nz) gets sent to the
> MS Mail mailbox thomsond in the MS Mail postoffice called wellington.
> I have left the mail situation like that - the names that the outside world
> sees are 'nice' and it saves a lot of hassle. For a couple of users I have
> added an alias into the unix alias file to remove the subdomain (eg.
> dave.thomson@ecnz.co.nz is just an alias for thomsond@wellington.ecnz.co.nz)
> You could suck the mailbox dump and massage it with awk to automatically
> produce a alias file if you want to do this for all your users.
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Well, what I ended up doing was quite simple as follows:
On the Microsoft SMTP gateway we mapped "po1.ms" and "po2.ms" - the two
Microsoft Mail post offices - to a one-word syntax. "po1.ms" got mapped to
"po1ms" and "po2.ms" got mapped to "po2ms".
In the hosts database - /etc/hosts - on the Alpha server we entered the
aliases "po1ms" and "po2ms" under the same I.P. number. In the mail alias file
- /usr/var/adm/sendmail/aliases - we entered each user as either belonging to
"po1ms" or "po2ms" - and it works now!
This might not be the "correct" way - but it certainly works.
Thanks to the three of you who gave me some valid advice.
Best regards
Paul Hostrup-Jessen
Bruel & Kjaer
Denmark
email: phj06@bk.dk