On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 06:22:50AM +0100, William Pursell wrote: > Thanks. I realized that by having my google account in > /etc/email-addresses, any mail delivery failures will > go to gmail instead of /var/mail, so I've done the following: > > > I followed Anoton's suggestion to run dpkg-reconfigure, > added a line to /etc/exim4/passwd.client, and then sent > an email that has gone away. (I expect to get a > mail delivery failure soon in /var/mail.) I then > ran strace on "mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] < foo" (the complete wrong > approach to system administration, but > I figure it's best to use the tools you know...:), but > this was unenlightening. > > I'm still confused as to why gmail is in the picture at > all when I run mailx. I did set smtp.gmail as my smtp > smarthost when I ran dpkg-reconfigure, but the only > reference to gmail in /etc/exim4 is in > update-exim4.conf.conf (via grep -iRe 'gmail\|google' *) > Surely the only affect that > file has is on execution of dpkg-reconfigure, no? > > Which exim4 config file is telling it to contact google > for smtp? >
If your outbound mail has to go to a smarthost then that's where gmail comes in. Since the mail ends up being sent to the internet from gmail, then that's where errors go back. It will not end up in your /var/mail unless you run fetchmail or something to pull it in. Exim sends mail out. Period. If you're mailing a local user, then exim sends it to /var/mail/$USER. Mailx is a mail user agent, which passes the mail you write to exim which is a mail transfer agent and this is where gmail comes in. When you dpkg-reconfigure exim4, its puts the gmail smarthost info in update-exim4.conf.conf. Whenever exim4 is restarted (as it is once you fininsh dpkg-reconfigure), the actual exim4.conf gets regenerated based on the info in update-exim4.conf.conf. by update-exim4, at which time the reference to gmail gets incorporated into exim4's configs. Doug. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
