[ALUG] How to send mail locally, solved but I don't really understand why

[Chris G]

Well I finally found a way to send mail to local recipients, quite by
chance really.

I have a POP3 mailbox set up at Gradwell.net to allow me to send
mail to 'myself' on my home machine (I read just about all of my
mail on a remote machine at Gradwell) which comes in useful
occasionally when I want to send a file to my home Linux box.  This
is set up in my isbd.net on Gradwell so it's home at isbd.net.  I just
occasionally run mutt locally on my desktop machine and collect
mail from this POP3 mailbox.

So, I realised that one way around my problem of sending mail to myself
on the desktop machine would be to put home at isbd.net as the alias for
root mail in /etc/aliases.  Before doing this I tried sending mail to
home at isbd.net from my desktop machine, it failed with "Error sending
message, child exited 67 (User unknown.).", huh?  I then realised that
this meant that sendmail was trying to send this *locally* and there's
no user called 'home' on this machine.

Euraka!!!  If I send mail to chris at isbd.net on my desktop machine it
gets sent to the local user chris and *not* to the place where it
would get sent if it was sent from anywhere else on the internet
(chris at isbd.net is one of my 'real' E-Mail addresses).

So, problem solved, I can put:-

    root:       chris at isbd.net

at the end of /etc/aliases and all the root mail will get to me
locally.

Quite *why* it's like this is anybody's guess!  :-)

-- 
Chris Green