[Building Sakai] To field rewritten by email service or something else?

[Adams, David]

I know this is getting off topic, here, but I just wanted to clarify a little bit. The mail *is* getting delivered correctly to Sakai. What I'm dumbfounded by, though, is that the mail server sees fit to rewrite the To: header, which is part of the message data--not part of the SMTP routing--and therefore shouldn't be touched. Oddly, though, it only happens on the way out...

I managed to squeeze in a DNS update to set things appropriately today and it has solved the problem. I'm fine with what amounts to a minor workaround for what is apparently a very common bug, though it drives me a little crazy.

This seems like a pretty important Sakai configuration warning. Is this documented anywhere? I'd be glad to do the work of getting it in the docs if someone can suggest the appropriate document to update.

-dave

-----Original Message-----
From: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org on behalf of Yuji Shinozaki
Sent: Thu 2009-04-23 10:25 AM
To: Adams, David
Cc: sakai-dev Dev
Subject: Re: [Building Sakai] To field rewritten by email service	orsomethingelse?
 
Like Stephen, we had gotten similar advice from our local mail  
admins:  always use an A record for your mail domain and MX records to  
direct the mail traffic as needed.

yuji
----

On Apr 23, 2009, at 10:14 AM, Stephen Marquard wrote:

> You shouldn't use a CNAME for the primary hostname of a mail domain  
> - rather use explicit A and MX records in your DNS.
>
> Some MTAs regard CNAMEs as aliases that should be resolved for mail  
> purposes (i.e. putting in the FQDN of the target) - I can't remember  
> the exact details but did investigate this a while back when we had  
> a similar configuration, and the solution was to change the DNS setup.
>
> Regards
> Stephen
>
> Stephen Marquard, Learning Technologies Co-ordinator
> Centre for Educational Technology, University of Cape Town
> http://www.cet.uct.ac.za
> Email/IM/XMPP: stephen.marquard at uct.ac.za
> Phone: +27-21-650-5037 Cell: +27-83-500-5290
>
>
>>>> "Adams, David" <da1 at vt.edu> 2009/04/23 04:07 PM >>>
> After some recent emergency DNS changes, we've discovered that the
> mailarchive messages arrive in users' emailboxes with an incorrect  
> 'To'
> line, which causes problems when they try to reply to the list.
>
> In particular, our production DNS name is scholar.vt.edu. Up until  
> last
> week that name was the A record for a particular IP. Then we moved  
> to a
> new IP, where the A record is prod.scholar.edtech.vt.edu and
> scholar.vt.edu is a CNAME/alias. However, now, emails sent to, eg,
> "CIS101 at scholar.vt.edu" are delivered correctly, but they arrive  
> with a
> To: field of "CIS101 at prod.scholar.edtech.vt.edu" which doesn't work  
> for
> replies.
>
> So my question is, is Sakai doing this? We've traced the message as  
> far
> as we can through the Sakai code and the To header seems to remain
> intact up to the point that the message is handed off to the
> javax.mail.SMTPTransport. We're working on checking the TCP traffic to
> see what Sakai is sending out, but in the meantime I was wondering  
> if I
> should be blaming Sakai for this or the outbound SMTP server? Has  
> anyone
> experienced this problem before?
>
> Thanks,
>
> David Adams
> Director of Learning Systems Integration and Support
> Virginia Tech Learning Technologies
>
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-----
Yuji Shinozaki
Sr. Technical Lead/Project Manager
University of Virginia
Advanced Technologies Group
ys2n at virginia.edu
-----
"Computers are useless.  They only give you answers". --Pablo Picasso






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