Jonbell (dot) Net

This post is a little tour over the CUSearch09 website

Found a nice little kicker today. At some point in the past few months, CUIT reconfigured their mail servers to only accept mail with a proper “MAIL-FROM” header response. Also, at some point (probably last year when we upgraded the box to 10.5 Leopard), Apple decided that it would be wise to switch the “www” user to have the primary name “_www” instead. Makes it less ambiguous if you had an OD user with the name “www”, but since all of my usernames are of the format of two to three letters and then at least one digit, it’s not a problem.

The result?
Apr 1 00:50:39 projects postfix/smtp[393]: 21386ACF69A: to=<*****@columbia.edu>, relay=external-smtp-multi-vif.cc.columbia.edu[128.59.48.6]:25, delay=0.98, delays=0.68/0.24/0.03/0.03, dsn=5.7.1, status=bounc
ed (host external-smtp-multi-vif.cc.columbia.edu[128.59.48.6] said: 554 5.7.1 Bad sender address (in reply to end of DATA command))

Basically, no matter what I told PHP to use for sendmail_from, at some point, postfix was just setting it to _www@<my domain name>. A quick and easy solution:

• Open Workgroup Manager.
• Authenticate to the local directory (pick “Local” from the dropdown)
• Go to Preferences, and select “Show ‘All Records’ tab and inspector” if not already checked.
• Click on the “all records” tab (next to computer lists, looks like bulls-eye)
• Select “Users” from the dropdown, then _www from the user list
• Delete the “RecordName” value _www, leaving just the “www” value (if _www is the only one, then just rename _www to www).
• That’s all!

Your mileage may vary, etc. but since I couldn’t find anything on google regarding this error, thought it would be nice to share.