local mail delivery (exim/mutt)

[FatherBusa]

I'm a recent convert to Gentoo from Debian. Everything is going swimmingly, but email configuration makes me cry. I just don't get it.

My old system used exim and mutt. I retrieved my mail through a remote imap server and sent mail through a remote smtp server.

When I switched to Gentoo, I emerged mutt and exim. I copied my Muttrc/.muttrc file over to Gentoo, and started receiving mail without any problems. It took me a a bit longer to figure out how to get mail out, but I eventually realized that I needed to add a router for "smarthost" to the exim.conf file (which is otherwise just a copy of exim.conf.dist). Now I can send mail.

Problem is, I can't seem to figure out how to send or receive local mail. I'm not trying to run a fancy local email network or anything like that. I'm just trying to intercept messages to root@localhost (or root@hardy, postmaster@hardy - hardy being the name of my machine); i.e., the sort of thing that gets sent from various processes on the system (like, say, snort). I changed /etc/mail/aliases so that everything ultimately points to my userid (and ran newaliases), but every time I try to send something to localhost (or hardy) it just disappears.

I'm really an imbecile when it comes to mail configuration. I don't really understand how it all works, but I suspect I'm failing to add something to exim.conf that's really basic. Anyone have any ideas that could help?

[adaptr]

You have to tell Exim what domain is your local domain - yes, even if it's "localhost.localdomain".
It won't know by itself.

Post your exim.conf and we'll take a look-see.

Did you try a diff between Deb and Gentoo versions of exim.conf ?
_________________
>>> emerge (3 of 7) mcse/70-293 to /
Essential tools: gentoolkit eix profuse screen

[FatherBusa]

Thanks for the reply.

Let me see if I can explain my setup a little better. I have two gentoo installs. One is at work and has a static IP address. The other is at home on a linksys WAP (I have it initiating a connection with the router using ifconfig instead of dhcp, because I want it to have the same IP address every time -- not sure if that's relevant). I want both of them to retrieve mail from an IMAP server and forward mail to an SMTP server.

My exim.conf file is exactly the same as exim.conf.dist, with this additional block added as the first router:

smarthost:
driver = manualroute
domains = ! +local_domains
route_list = * my.remote.smtp.server bydns
transport = remote_smtp

Now, this only sort of works for the home machine. It puts the name of the localhost (hardy) into the sender field, which I think is tripping up some systems (like when I send to an aol address). I've tried to circumvent that by putting sendmail="/usr/sbin/exim -f myid@myaddress.com" in .muttrc and uncommenting "unset use_from" in /etc/Muttrc, but this is terribly muddled and I'm not sure what I'm doing.

Now, perhaps I'm really taking the wrong tack. All my regular mail is via sattelite (IMAP/remote SMTP), so exim seems like overkill. I tried installing ssmtp, and it works like a charm. But, of course, that doesn't help me with local mail delivery. Again, all I really want is for email from local daemons and whatnot to get sent to a local address.