Executive Summary:

What is the proper way in Courier to handle incoming mail that is addressed with a To: address that includes a machine name that is not the mail server's name, but either an old name which still exists in the DNS as a CNAME for the current name, or a different machine name but which is MX'ed to the current name?

Detailed description:

I've moved my old production Sendmail server out of the way and replaced it with my testbed Courier (0.45.6) setup and have run into several problems as a result.

I run a small group's organizational e-mail server, let's call it "orgmailserver.domain.tld". (The mail servers for domain.tld are outside my aegis, and have nothing to do with orgmailserver.domain.tld.) orgmailserver is *not* a subdomain - it's Just Another Host inside domain.tld.

The mail host had two previous incarnations, let's call them oldcname1 and oldcname2. Both names still exist in the DNS as CNAMEs to org.domain.tld.

Also, we have well over a hundred hosts in the organization; and since we want e-mail for these hosts to all go to "orgmailserver", they are all MX'ed to be

eenie.domain.tld MX 0 orgmailserver.domain.tld meenie.domain.tld MX 0 orgmailserver.domain.tld minie.domain.tld MX 0 orgmailserver.domain.tld moe.domain.tld MX 0 orgmailserver.domain.tld ...

You get the idea.

Mail coming in from the outside world to orgmailserver.domain.tld that was addressed to

user@oldcname1 user@oldcname2 user@eenie user@meenie

etc. was all getting rejected with "513 Relaying denied."

I thought this was the whole purpose of .../courier/etc/locals, to act somewhat like Sendmail's "/etc/mail/sendmail.cw" file, where I could toss in

oldcname1 oldcname1.domain.tld oldcname2 oldcname2.domain.tld eenie eenie.domain.tld ...

and have Courier recognize that any "To:" address with those names in it were really local delivery addresses. But that wasn't working. Why is that?

I have temporarily kludged around this by putting

.domain.tld

into ".../courier/etc/esmtpacceptmailfor.dir/default" - is this the "accepted"/correct way to deal with this issue?

If so, I'm not sure this temporary kludge works 100% - a SPAM just came in targetted for the old CNAME, instead of it being rejected as User Unknown, it caused

Final-Recipient: rfc822; a1aa...@oldcname1.domain.tld Action: failed Status: 5.0.0 Diagnostic-Code: unknown; configuration error: mail loops back to myself (MX problem).

Having the old CNAME listed in Sendmail's "sendmail.cw" worked to prevent these MX loop backs; but I'm trying to get this to work in Courier.

- Greg