I cannot catch a break with my e-mail server - RonO's Ramblings

Since upgrading SUSE on my Linux box, which is the everything server for the ron-oakes.us domain, thus my real e-mail server (I tell people to use ron at oakes dot net, but it just gets forwarded and filtered on my server).

Most of the time, it has been working except for mail sent inside the system. That bounces with an error saying something like "defiant.ron-oakes.us loops back to itself." Mostly this impacts cron messages, but I'm afraid to forward stuff to Tara using the inside shortcut while this is going on.

Last night I thought I'd solved the problem, only to discover that I'd started bouncing all messages back to oakes.net. Fortunately I'm still keeping a copy. So after reverting the configuration I tried to pull them to my server (in an alternate account to not get months worth of back e-mail) using fetchmail. But everything fetchmail pulled down bounced since it couldn't find an account for ron2 at localhost.ron-oakes.us (this account is now deleted so don't try to send to it). By the time I knew that there was a problem, I'd sent bounce messages all over the world.

So, if you got one or more bounce messages from me this morning, I'm sorry. I've fixed the cause, but the server may still be catching up with the failed e-mail.

I just hope I wasn't automatically unsubscribed from too many lists due to this. I can check a couple, but I don't always remember the host and passwords for all of my lists.