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Asked: 2010-02-22 09:46:03 +0800 CST

sendmail: forward wildcard MX to a single email address

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I'm trying to set up sendmail to forward all email to **@ **.crm.mycompany.com to [email protected]. Unfortunately my sendmail-fu isn't up to it and I can't find anything useful on Google.

My plan was to use an existing internal Linux server (CentOS 5), port-forward SMTP traffic from one of our spare external IPs to it and set up a wildcard MX record to point to that external IP. However I haven't managed to make sendmail work with this.

I have managed to get the non-wildcard case working, e.g. by adding test.crm.mycompany.com to /etc/mail/local-host-names and adding a "@test.crm.mycompany.com" line to virtusertable. However I can't see how to do the wildcard case. These files don't seem to accept wildcards in the domain names and as far as I can see the only configuration that can manage wildcard DNS is the relay_entire_domain. However if I configure my test domain for relay then it ignores the virtusertable and procmail and just tries to relay the email on - so unless I can trigger either of those for relay emails I don't think I can manage this anyway. And a final wrinkle here is that I can't seem to set $=m to mycompany.com - it's always our internal domain name (the hostname is server.internal.lan and $=m is internal.lan) and DOMAIN(mycompany.com)dnl in sendmail.mc tries to include a file from /usr/share (?).

Is what I'm trying to do possible? I was hoping to reuse an internal server for this - do I need to put a server outside the firewall or in the DMZ instead? Would this be easier with postfix or something else instead?

Thanks for any suggestions!
Rupert.

sendmail wildcard mx-record

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    As you noted, you need a DNS wildcard.

    When mail from the wildcard addresses comes in, sendmail doesn't know what to do with it. You can fix that by adding a sendmail rewrite rule to rewrite the wild subdomain parts into the main domain part.

    in your sendmail.mc:

    LOCAL_NET_CONFIG  
R $+ < @ $+ .example.com. > $*    $: $1 < @ example.com > $3       dnl

    Note that you need a tab to separate the left-hand side rule from the right-hand side replacement. ($* ends the left-hand side; $: starts the right-hand side.) Note that the trailing dot on the left-hand side may or may not be necessary. Also note you need a second tab after the right-hand side and the comment (between $3 and dnl).

    You'll want to make sure example.com is in your relay-domains file.

    Once the domain has been collapsed by the rewrite rule, you can route all mail for the domain to a single user with a virtusertable entry:

    @example.com  luser

    That should about do it.

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