Exim rejecting mail: “Remote host address is the local host”

[twv]

I retired an old server (old.server.com) and moved its accounts to a new server (new.server.com). The A record for old.server.com points to new.server.com. Exim is rejecting mail to [email protected] with the message “[email protected] R=lookuphost defer (-1): remote host address is the local host”

How can I get exim to accept the mail and deliver it to [email protected]?

 

[Richard G]

Just one question. If you retire a server, why would you still want to send mail from the old hostname?

What you want is not possible since the hostname is not a domain and does not have an MX page where you can deselect the option to "handle this server for my mail".
So obviously mail send to [email protected] will be seen as send to localhost.

It's better to just put it down. Normally DNS synch is only a few hours. Mail being which is send during that time is mostly delayed and retried after a certain amount of hours.

Or if you want to keep things until resolving, then you can use rsync to synchronise e-mail accounts.

 

[twv]

I don’t want to send from that domain. I want to receive mail to that domain. The reason is that I use [email protected] in lots of monitoring setups and I want to receive any notices until I get a chance to update the setups.

 

[Richard G]

Since Exim rejected it, have you already tried putting it in one or more of Exim's whitelists in the /etc/virtual directory?
Like whitelist_domains or whitelist_from for example? You can even use multiple.

 

[twv]

Good idea, but it doesn’t seem to change it.

I found this: “remote host address is the local host is an exim error message which indicates that the sender or recipient's domain has your machine's hostname/IP, but exim is not configured to accept mail for that domain.” from this thread: https://forum.directadmin.com/threads/exim-mainlog-temporarily-rejected-rcpt.60529/ , but I haven’t figured out how to configure exim to accept mail for the old hostname.

 

[Richard G]

I know it's an Exim error message.
That is odd, because whitelists should overrule that anyway. Did you tried multiple whitelists and also restart Exim after making the additions?

But it's a bit confusing anyway.

I don’t want to send from that domain. I want to receive mail to that domain.

To be able to receive something, something else needs to be sending things even if it's to localhost. So your old server is sending, that is what I mean.

Now what exactly is it about. Is it a hostname or is it a domain?
Because if it's a domain, then a better example would be user@oldserverdomain and user@newserverdomain otherwise I think it's a hostname.

Also I don't know if (in case of a hostname) it's smart in this case, to point to A record to the new server's ip, maybe it's better to use another solution.

But I'm just fishing, way too little info to be able to give a good advise further.

Maybe fastes is to quickly start changing the mails in the monitoring tools.

 

[twv]

It’s a FQDN. DA does support multiple FQDNs -- for example, you can configure DA to include additional FQDNs in your server certificate. It’s not a big deal. I will just update the monitors.