{"id":18,"date":"2008-06-15T00:12:58","date_gmt":"2008-06-14T16:12:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/?p=18"},"modified":"2008-06-15T00:15:45","modified_gmt":"2008-06-14T16:15:45","slug":"sendmail-dsn-forwarding-roots-mail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/2008\/06\/15\/sendmail-dsn-forwarding-roots-mail\/","title":{"rendered":"Sendmail DSN – forwarding root’s mail"},"content":{"rendered":"

Further to my earlier article “Streamyx SMTP server authentication problem<\/a>“, the other part of my problem was the DSN – Delivery Status Notification<\/strong> emails were not coming to any of my interactive users. I thought at the time they might be going to the sender, since the mails were coming from a PHP web application<\/strong>. In fact, the notifications were going to root<\/strong> – the owner of the sendmail process.<\/p>\n

I could see the notifications – all I needed to do was log in as root (I never do this – always su root<\/strong>!) and use the mail<\/strong> program. There I could see lots of emails that told me exactly why they hadn’t been delivered:<\/p>\n

reason: 530 5.7.1 Authentication required Refer http:\/\/webmail.tm.net.my\/smtpauth.html<\/code><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

At this point, I’d just like to repeat the point of the previous article. Our authentication<\/strong> had been just fine<\/strong> for more than a year. Recently TM<\/strong> quietly changed policy<\/strong> and started rejecting<\/strong> authentication attempts from users who hadn’t changed their password<\/strong> since signing up for Streamyx. That URL tells you nothing about the policy change<\/strong>, you have to work that one out for yourself! OK, maybe it’s a bit lame<\/strong>, never changing a default password that’s the same<\/strong> for all users, but a clear statement about the wheres and hows would have been only respectable.<\/p>\n

Back to root mail forwarding. The Internet is your friend<\/strong>. There are all manner of complicated ways of doing it, but the one I opted for is so simple<\/strong>, I don’t know why I didn’t always know it. Just write a ‘.forward file<\/strong>‘ in root’s HOME directory<\/strong>. Mark Roth’s sendmail tutorial explains<\/strong> it best, see: The .forward File<\/a><\/p>\n

In this example, I opt to receive<\/strong> root’s mail, and also forward it non-recursively<\/strong> (that’s what the backslash means) to root:<\/p>\n

\"Forwarding<\/a><\/p>\n

This seems to work a treat. I’m hoping this means I won’t be thrashing around completely in the dark the next time TM change the email rules!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Further to my earlier article “Streamyx SMTP server authentication problem“, the other part of my problem was the DSN – Delivery Status Notification emails were not coming to any of my interactive users. I thought at the time they might be going to the sender, since the mails were coming from a PHP web application. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[29,18],"class_list":["post-18","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fixed","tag-email","tag-server"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}