sendmail, 4th Edition

Look Up a Remote Host’s Name

When sendmail begins to run as a daemon, it creates a socket, binds to that socket, and listens for incoming SMTP connections. When a remote host connects to the local host, sendmail uses the accept(2) library routine to accept the connection. The accept(2) routine provides the IP address of the remote machine to sendmail. After that, it calls gethostbyaddr(3) or getipnodebyaddr(3) to convert that IP address to a canonical hostname. The sendmail program then calls gethostbyname(3) or getipnodebyname(3) to find all the addresses for that found hostname. If the original address is not in that list, sendmail considers the address and hostname to be forgeries and records that fact in its syslog messages, its added Received: header, and its reply to the initial greeting:

(may be forged)

The sendmail program needs a valid canonical hostname for five reasons:

• The remote hostname is compared to the local hostname to prevent sendmail from connecting to itself.

• The remote hostname claimed in the HELO or EHLO SMTP line is compared to the canonical name. If they differ, sendmail adds text noting that difference to its SMTP reply, and adds both to the Received: header it generated.

• The macro $s is assigned the canonical hostname as its value.

• The canonical name is included in many log messages produced by the setting of the LogLevel (L) option (LogLevel on page 1040) and is available for inclusion in Received: header (Received: on page 1162) lines.

• The canonical name is ...