Incorrect Return-Path in Outgoing Email

Casey_McCarthy · May 10, 2002, 3:06pm

Hi all, first of all I would like to say that RT is a great product, we
just upgraded from 1.0 to 2.0 and it works wonderfully. Thanks to all those
that worked on it.

I have only one problem remaining. All of our e-mails go through a server
named monk.int.uncommongoods.com and get forwarded to
sandman.int.uncommongoods.com (the server that RT runs on). Both use Qmail
as the MTA. The problem is that the email is sent out with a return-path of
“sandman.int.uncommongoods.com” instead of “queuename@uncommongoods.com”
where queuename is the actual queuename. This causes a lot of emails sent
out to bounce, since other MTAs won’t except messages with return-paths
from the non-public domain (sandman.int.uncommongoods.com). How do i change
that to a public domain (uncommongoods.com). Below is the bounced message
(I xxx’d out the actual e-mail address).
Thanks so much in advance to whoever can help me!

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at sandman.int.uncommongoods.com.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.
xxx@xxx.com:
Connected to 212.114.202.114 but sender was rejected.
Remote host said: 501 5.1.8 root@sandman.int.uncommongoods.com… Domain
of sender address root@sandman.int.uncommongoods.com does not exist

— Below this line is a copy of the message.

Message-Id: rt-66241-144565.1.13590912109437@UCG
In-Reply-To: rt-66241@UCG
Managed-BY: Request Tracker 2.0.13 (http://www.fsck.com/projects/rt/)
RT-Ticket: UCG #66241
Precedence: bulk
RT-Originator: trevor@uncommongoods.com
Sender: Nobody Nobody@sandman.int.uncommongoods.com

Greg_White1 · May 11, 2002, 5:37am

Hi all, first of all I would like to say that RT is a great product, we
just upgraded from 1.0 to 2.0 and it works wonderfully. Thanks to all those
that worked on it.

I have only one problem remaining. All of our e-mails go through a server
named monk.int.uncommongoods.com and get forwarded to
sandman.int.uncommongoods.com (the server that RT runs on). Both use Qmail
as the MTA. The problem is that the email is sent out with a return-path of
“sandman.int.uncommongoods.com” instead of “queuename@uncommongoods.com”
where queuename is the actual queuename. This causes a lot of emails sent
out to bounce, since other MTAs won’t except messages with return-paths
from the non-public domain (sandman.int.uncommongoods.com). How do i change
that to a public domain (uncommongoods.com). Below is the bounced message
(I xxx’d out the actual e-mail address).
Thanks so much in advance to whoever can help me!

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at sandman.int.uncommongoods.com.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.
xxx@xxx.com:
Connected to 212.114.202.114 but sender was rejected.
Remote host said: 501 5.1.8 root@sandman.int.uncommongoods.com… Domain
of sender address root@sandman.int.uncommongoods.com does not exist

This is very much a qmail question, rather than an RT question, but
since I know qmail much better than I know RT internals, I’m happy to
try to help.

Solution 1. Hax0r RT’s config file to use ‘-f’. Untested as shown below,
but should function.

$MailCommand = ‘sendmailpipe’;
$SendmailArguments=“-f’thisaddress@thishost.example.com’ -oi”;
$SendmailPath = “/var/qmail/bin/sendmail”;

Watch out for Perl re-interpreting the ‘@’ – you may need to escape it.

Solution 2. Hax0r qmail so that outbound mail defaults to the host you
want. In most qmail installations, this simply requires a lie in
/var/qmail/control/me – i.e., echo “thisisthevalidhost.example.com” >
/var/qmail/control/me". You could also do some serious trickery with the
qmail environment variables, but if you only use this host for RT, the
‘me’ hack is probably the cleanest.

My opinion of mail hosts that reject email based on the resolvability of
the domain in MAIL FROM: is best left for another day.

Greg White