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Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 20:20:10 -0600
To: Jim Shankland <jas@flyingfox.COM>, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
From: Allen Hyer <allenh@wtrt.net>
Subject: Re:  Simple sendmail question
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At 05:28 PM 1/30/97 -0800, Jim Shankland wrote:
>> Email is working ok on my server.  I have one question/problem.
>> When someone sends mail to a nonexistant address, I get the
>> famous "config error: mail loops back to me" error message.
>> Mail to/from valid addresses work fine.  Is this normal?  Or, is
>> there something in the config file that needs tweaking?
>
>You're using a wildcard MX, right?  So if someone sends mail
>to foobarola.wtrt.net, it ends up on your mail host.  But your
>mail host tries to deliver to foobarola.wtrt.net, which doesn't
>really exist, so it falls back to the wildcard MX, and tries
>to deliver to itself, and barfs.
>
>Solution:  Either lose the wildcard MX (my personal preference),
>or make sendmail on your mail server strip off any host stuff
>to the left of wtrt.net before processing, so that, e.g.,
>"joebob@foobarola.wtrt.net" gets rewritten to "joebob@wtrt.net"
>before it attempts delivery.

Yep.  You're right.  I did have a wildcard MX record.  Notice the past
tense.  It has been removed, and it fixed the problem.  I didn't need it,
not sure why I had it, but it's gone now.

Thanks for you help,
Allen Hyer
System Administrator
West Texas Rural Telephone