Solaris-Specific Rules

Several special rules have been added to work with the name space. These rules are not generic to sendmail, so can only be used on systems running the Solaris software.

The special form $%y matches any host name in the hosts information in the name space. Either local or remote hosts can be matched using this rule. It does a most-to-least multitoken match, so it can handle fully qualified host names as well as a short local host name.

The $%x form matches MX records through DNS. This will succeed even if the A-record does not exist in the DNS database.

The $%l matches any fully qualified host in the local domain. If NIS or local files are being used, this means that the host name in the name space must include the local domain name or DNS forwarding has to be turned on. The NIS+ name space will qualify the host name appropriately, without any changes.

To use $%l in a NIS environment in which DNS forwarding cannot be set up and the name space cannot be changed to use fully qualified host names, add the following line into the configuration file:

DAhosts.byname

and replace all occurrences of %l with %A. You can use any non-conflicting letter in place of the A. This will turn off the need to look up fully qualified names, as long as the target host can be resolved to an IP address and it is a single token name. All resolved addresses are assumed to be local, so make sure that the name space does not contain any single-token host entries that are external to the mail domain.