[plug] Boy is sendmail temperamental or what !!!!

[Michael Hunt]

Ok before I get a barrage of "why are you using sendmail" type info (and
Debian uses qmail (or whatever) I'm wondering if someone might shed some
light on the following scenario:

I use cyrus imap server and sendmail for my mail solution on my home dialup
box. Essentially all the mail for my domain is collected by my ISP into a
pop3 mailbox and I use fetchmail to retrieve it. Up until last night I had
fetchmail dump it all into my account on the server.

I have some other family and friends who I wanted to set-up some mail
accounts for (they currently have user accounts on the box) and of course
they didn't want there userid as there mail address, so I decided to set-up
aliases for them and then my whole mail setup went to pieces after I issued
a newaliases command.

Update !!!!!!

I drafted this message yesterday but didn't get around to sending it till
today. Since then I have looked into my logs and found the cause of the
problem.

1. If I read the doco correctly I would have realised that I set the entries
up in the aliases file around the wrong way. The mail bounced because it
couldn't find accounts named after my aliases.
2. Because of the bounces I also saw some identd entries for plug hosts
(well at least from the admin). I'm sorry for doing something dumb and
spamming the list and gather this is why my sub got dropped.
3. I have since looked at my sendmail config and realise that if I buy the
"bat book" I'll probably go "batty" just trying to understand it and would
probably put a match to the book in my frustration.

<rant>

Some one please show me how to install Debian so I can get out of this mess.
I basically think rpms suck because the packager never seems to think that
there are other ways of doing things.

</rant>

By the way my question 3with regards to wildcard aliases is that I use it on
the POP3 account at the ISP and just want to catch mail into my account that
might not be addressed to anyone in particular.