Les Mikesell wrote: >You appear to have a wild-card mx for *.nurdog.com but aren't >set up to handle all the possible names. What should happen >even if you add your domain to the unresolvable one is that > >you would still get a 'host not found' from the dns lookup. > Thanks Les I believe I understand now. I don't have a wild-card mx but I think I know where you were going with this. My zone file was originally put together by my ISP: $ORIGIN nurdog.com. $TTL 5h ; @ IN SOA ns1.mric.net. support.mric.net. ( 2006021901 ; serial 1h ; refresh 30m ; retry 7d ; expiration 1h ) ; minimum ; @ NS ns1.mric.net. @ NS ns2.mric.net. @ A 204.144.183.66 * A 204.144.183.66 ; nurdog.com. IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx a:mail.nurdog.com a:smtp.nurdog.com ~all" @ MX 1 nureyev.nurdog.com. I never changed anything from the original setup after I took control. With the wild-card A record I will never get a host not found error. Just now I removed the wild card A record and placed only explicit entries for hosts which I know about. Now I get the desired behavior: # sendmail -bt -C./sendmail.cf ADDRESS TEST MODE (ruleset 3 NOT automatically invoked) Enter <ruleset> <address> > 3,0 jdavidson4 at home.com canonify input: jdavidson4 @ home . com Canonify2 input: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > Canonify2 returns: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > canonify returns: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > parse input: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > Parse0 input: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > Parse0 returns: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > ParseLocal input: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > ParseLocal returns: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > Parse1 input: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > Mailertable input: < home . com > jdavidson4 < @ home . com > Mailertable input: home . < com > jdavidson4 < @ home . com > Mailertable returns: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > Mailertable returns: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > MailerToTriple input: < > jdavidson4 < @ home . com > MailerToTriple returns: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > Parse1 returns: $# esmtp $@ home . com $: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > parse returns: $# esmtp $@ home . com $: jdavidson4 < @ home . com > Thanks for pointing this out ... it was driving me crazy. -- Paul (ganci at nurdog.com)