How do I Forward root's email to an external email address?

I have a small server (Ubuntu 10.04) at my house and I would like to forward root's email to my gmail hosted domain to get security notifications and what not.

I ripped everything out and started from scratch and ran into some other issues.

I now have sendmail working in the sense that I can mail [email protected] and get the mail.

HOWEVER, adding an address to /root/.forward does not actually forward the message. I get the following in my logs:

Dec 22 14:04:37 batcave sendmail[4695]: 
       oBML4bAT004695: to=<root@batcave>, ctladdr=aburns (1000/1000), 
       delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=30075, 
       relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (oBML4bJ9004696 
       Message accepted for delivery)
Dec 22 14:04:39 batcave sm-mta[4698]: STARTTLS=client, relay=[69.145.248.18],
       version=TLSv1/SSLv3, verify=FAIL, cipher=DES-CBC3-SHA, bits=168/168
Dec 22 14:04:40 batcave sm-mta[4698]: oBML4bJ9004696: to=<[email protected]>,
       ctladdr=<[email protected]> (1000/1000), delay=00:00:03, xdelay=00:00:03,
       mailer=relay, pri=120336, relay=[69.145.248.18] [69.145.248.18], 
       dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (OK 01/D4-00853-216621D4)

You can see where my local sendmail instance accepts it then hands it off to my ISP, but with the wrong address ([email protected]).

Solution 1:

Instead of using /root/.forward, have you tried putting

root: [email protected]

into /etc/aliases?

(Note that you need to run newaliases after updating the aliases file.)

Solution 2:

The most likely reason is reverse DNS: does the IP of your box have an RR DNS entry? Doing a forward lookup on the host shown in the logs (assuming you didn't modify) gives:

[root@ryor:~] dig batcave.batcavern.com

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4-P1.1 <<>> batcave.batcavern.com
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 7005
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;batcave.batcavern.com.         IN      A

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
batcavern.com.          3600    IN      SOA     ns1.sitelutions.com. erebusbat.batcavern.com. 54 28000 7200 604800 5

;; Query time: 503 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Mon Nov 29 22:02:30 2010
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 101

[root@ryor:~]

So it looks as if it doesn't even have an A record. An SMTP host hoping to deliver mail and not be considered a spam relay needs to have both A and RR records.