DNS tells mail to go to the wrong host? (Sorry, long post here..)

[Barry Margolin]

In article <7tep7l$c0v at chronicle.concentric.net>,
David Cunningham <newsonly at please.com> wrote:
>through sendmail on mercury to neon.beta.com.  So far I can't do this.  When
>I try, I get a sendmail delivery error from mercury saying the user does not
>exist.  Of course I have verified that the user (david at beta.com) does in
>fact exist.  In fact I tried to send mail directly to david at beta.com by
>setting up Outlook Express (on Poweron) to use neon.beta.com as the SMTP
>server and it gets through fine.  So here is the conclusion I'm drawing.
>Neon can receive mail for beta.com fine but mercury is not routing the mail
>to it.
>
>To confirm this I unplugged neon (aka argon) from my hub and tried to send
>mail to david at beta.com by way of mercury again.  Again Mercury says the user
>is unknown.  This is weird considering sendmail on mercury can't even talk
>to sendmail on neon.  This has me thinking that maybe for some reason
>mercury is trying to deliver david at beta.com to it's own local mailboxes.
>
>So I created a david account on mercury.  Now mercury happily delivers
>emails for david at beta.com to it's own david account.  This is not the
>desired result.  Beta.com should be on neon, not mercury.

This sounds like a problem with mercury's sendmail configuration, not a DNS
problem.  If you have "Cw beta.com" in mercury's configuration, or you have
beta.com in its sendmail.cw file, it will try to deliver all mail for
user at beta.com locally -- the Cw line is for telling sendmail what hostnames
should be delivered locally, rather than via SMTP.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Burlington, MA
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