Topic: Qmail delivery to an Alias that does not exist?

[Cyrus Bharda]

Howdy yall,

I got a call from a user saying that he had recieved an email that was not addressed to him, so I checked it out and here is the header:

Return-Path:
Delivered-To: peter@esmith.langs.net.au
Received: (qmail 12426 invoked by alias); 23 Mar 2003 13:04:30 -0000
Delivered-To: alias-localdelivery-peter@langs.net.au
Received: (qmail 12421 invoked by uid 0); 23 Mar 2003 13:04:29 -0000
Received: from host217-35-6-101.in-addr.btopenworld.com (HELO bigfoot.com) (217.35.6.101)
  by esmith.langs.net.au (203.22.141.171) with SMTP; 23 Mar 2003 13:04:25 -0000
Message-ID: <81f5e26ed48c$9127a7ef$9c7af943@xnnyrgisefn.alo>
From:
To: Alex@langs.net.au
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2003 07:03:52 +0600
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
   charset="iso-8859-1"
X-Priority: 3
User-Agent:
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Subject: Possible SPAM (accuracy very high):  Make money with your computer!
X-RAV-Signature: 19451C3AAF40C53D8669C5F3FD1D296B


My question is this, WHY would this get delivered IF:

1. It was addressed to Alex@langs.net.au but peter@langs.net.au go it?

2. There is NO user Alex and NO psudonym Alex that points to peter?

Thanks for your time,

Cyrus Bharda

[Cyrus Bharda]

Checked stmpfront-qmail logs and it is rcpt'd to peter@langs.net.au, and that is an alias, so it is working fine, but still does not explain how in the header it showed To: Alex@langs.net.au ??

Cyrus Bharda

[Rich Lafferty]

There's no reason to assume consistency between the headers in the message and the envelope. The trivial example is the Bcc: header; more complex explanations might include email being forwarded from one account to another, or someone using the "Bounce" feature in their email client.

As a practical example, I received a copy of your message by email, and it was delivered to richl-forums@e-smith.com, but the To: header read

To: Experienced User Forum

The important debugging bits in the headers you posted in the original post
in this thread were the Delivered-To: headers, which told you what qmail
actually did with the message once it got it.

Cheers,
--Rich

[Cyrus Bharda]

Rich,

Thanks for clearing that up, muchly appreciated

Cyrus Bharda