masquerading domain name 1171

OK, this is going to be interesting...

Dances With Crows

I've heard that, esp. about Postfix. I'll look into it! In the meantime, since as you indicate later, this doesn't appear to be a mail server issue, I'm going to backburner that for the time being. No sense having 12 irons in the fire instead of 11. =)

OK. Our domain name is pointed to and resolves to a hosted server way off-site. But we have processes on a fileserver here at the office that needs to send e-mails as well. It's a fileserver that is indeed behind a firewall-NAT. This fileserver I have inetc-hosts: 127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain localhost (server's IP) fileserve fileserve.(ourdomain name).com

which allows it to be refered to as "fileserve.domainname.com". But when you do a "host (ip address)" it resolves to the ISP's name for our connection. Not the domain name, obviously. Which indeed makes sense that if the recipient mail receiver is doing a resolution on the sending IP it's not going to make sense as coming from a domain (because...it's not.)

Well, we don't run our own DNS. Since the actual domain name we have has to point to the IP of the hosted server way out there somewhere, it looks like what we'll need to do to allow mail from this fileserver to be resolved acceptably, is to get another domain name and point it to this IP? Sound about right?

Yep, figured that one out the hard way. =) Lesson learned.

Yep, it does help! Thanks for helping me really understand what's going on. To repeat myself, does it sound to you with how I (hopefully clarified things) the only way to allow e-mail from this fileserver to be received by some mail servers is to register its own domain name to have pointed to it, so the IP properly resolves to a domain name?

Or, your mentioning of having the ISP do a PTR or delegation... is that something that could still work in this case? That is, (I don't know much about DNS (duh!) ) so, when the receiving mail server tries to do a rDNS on the sending IP address, the responding message from the ISP would be something acceptable, even though our domain name is actually pointed to a server on a host with a different ISP?

THANKS! -Liam