Route all mail to one email address.

Hi,

I am pretty new to linux and am in the process of moving from shared webhosting to running my own dedi.

I am running Debian and have successfully managed to get Apache2/PHP5/MySQL5 all running fine.

My problem is, that on my old account all unrouted mail was forwarded to my ISP email address. As I had no email accounts set up mail sent to *@mydomain.com was sent to my ISP email account.

Now I have moved my domain over to my dedi I am wanting to have the same setup, however, I can not work out how to do this.

Does anyone have any ideas? Currently I only have sendmail, no mail server.

Thanks,

Matt.

sendmail is a mail server silly, but it is a smtp server so you will need a pop server to recieve mail such as dovecot. Dovecot does pop3 and imap.

If you have that then you need to set up your MX records with whoever does your DNS.

Once your mail knows where to go you will be good to go

nslookup should tell you where mail is going

nslookup mail.yourdomain.com
should resolve your mail server IP address.

Make sense?

My MX record is set up fine I think.

I am not wanting to get mail from my isp account into my mailbox on my dedi, but I want all mail sent to my dedi's domain (*@mydomain.com) to be automatically routed to my ISP address.

Basically I want mail sent to *@mydomain.com to be forwarded to myname@isp.com.

You might have just told me how to do that, but I don't think so.

Thanks,

Matt.

Oh well there are a couple of ways to do this.

Do you want to route all mail to your username to your ISP? Or do you want to route all mail to the ISP? If you are going to forward all mail why have a mail server.

Here is one way to do it.

create a user account say joe

IN your /etc/mail directory you have a folder called.
virtualusertable

edit that file and in it put in

joe <tab><tab> yourisp.com

then save
type make
then restart sendmail
/etc/init.d/sendmail restart
then all mail to joe will go to your isp account.

If you want to be a gateway you can edit your mail to work as a smtp gateway and it can send all your mail to a certain place. I don't know that on top of my head and I am not going to look it up if that isn't your intention. <--the reason someone might do this is to filter spam without taking a hit on the actual mail server. No point if you are running your own server.

You can also do a forward in your users home directory but I don't know the format as I use the virtualusertable myself.

Thanks, that looks like what I'm after.

However I currently have no 'virtualusertable' file in /etc/mail - should i just create it? Or do I need something installed?

Finally, I would like mail to:

*@mydomain.com to be routed to myname@isp.com

But there are other domains pointed to this server too (for virtual apache servers), I do not want mail sent to those domains to come to me.

Thanks for the help,

Matt.

vi /etc/mail/sendmail.cf

search for DS

# "Smart" relay host (may be null)
DS<ip-address to relay>

restart sendmail.


This is what you will need to do to relay to your ISP, but your ISP will have to allow your machine to relay.

If you want to just receive emails at your ISP account you will have to receive them on your server then forward them to your ISP.

Make sense?

Yeah that makes sense.

But my ISP wont allow me to relay, so I need my machine to receive it and then forward it along, like you can in cPanel (which I dont have as its rather expensive).

Do you know how I could do this?

Thanks,

Matt.

definitely

post this for me
ls -la /etc/mail

what distro are you running?

Code:

---

Debian-31-sarge-32-minimal:/# ls -la /etc/mail
total 248
drwxr-sr-x  7 smmta smmsp  4096 2007-04-13 19:09 .
drwxr-xr-x 65 root  root  4096 2007-04-14 13:58 ..
-rw-------  1 root  root  4211 2007-04-13 11:40 access
-rw-r-----  1 smmta smmsp 12288 2007-04-13 11:40 access.db
-rw-r--r--  1 root  root    281 2006-12-09 05:22 address.resolve
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root  smmsp    10 2007-04-13 11:40 aliases -> ../aliases
-rw-r-----  1 smmta smmsp 12288 2007-04-13 19:10 aliases.db
-rw-r--r--  1 root  smmsp    6 2007-04-13 19:09 aliases.lock
-rw-r--r--  1 root  root  3122 2007-04-13 11:40 databases
-rw-r--r--  1 root  root  5594 2006-12-09 05:23 helpfile
-rw-r--r--  1 root  smmsp    20 2007-04-13 11:40 local-host-names
drwxr-sr-x  2 smmta smmsp  4096 2007-04-13 11:40 m4
-rwxr-xr--  1 root  smmsp  9749 2007-04-13 11:40 Makefile
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  root  4096 2007-04-13 11:40 peers
-rw-r--r--  1 root  smmsp    16 2007-04-13 11:45 relay-domains
drwxr-xr-x  2 root  smmsp  4096 2006-12-09 05:22 sasl
-rw-r--r--  1 root  smmsp 63874 2007-04-13 11:45 sendmail.cf
-rw-r--r--  1 root  smmsp  269 2007-04-13 11:40 sendmail.cf.errors
-rw-r--r--  1 root  root  11888 2007-04-13 11:40 sendmail.conf
-rw-r--r--  1 root  smmsp  4103 2007-04-13 11:40 sendmail.mc
-rw-r--r--  1 root  root    149 2006-12-09 05:22 service.switch
-rw-r--r--  1 root  root    180 2006-12-09 05:22 service.switch-nodns
drwxr-sr-x  2 smmta smmsp  4096 2007-04-13 11:40 smrsh
-rw-r--r--  1 root  smmsp 43629 2007-04-13 11:40 submit.cf
-rw-r--r--  1 root  smmsp  2284 2007-04-13 11:40 submit.mc
drwxr-xr-x  2 smmta smmsp  4096 2007-04-13 11:40 tls
-rw-r--r--  1 root  smmsp    0 2007-04-13 11:40 trusted-users

---

Running Debian (shown in the first line).