PMDF System Manager's Guide

The validatelocalnone and validatelocalsystem channel keywords control whether any validity check on the local part (username) of an address is performed when messages are enqueued to the channel. Different sorts of channels have different defaults; most channels default to validatelocalnone, meaning that no validation of the local part of the address is performed by the channel doing the enqueuing to the channel in question, but the local channel defaults to validatelocalsystem, meaning that the local part (username) of an address must be a valid, e-mail receiving account on the system. More specifically, validatelocalsystem means that on UNIX platforms, the local part (username) must have an account on the system, or on OpenVMS platforms that the local part (username) must have an account or VMS MAIL profile entry.

When validatelocalnone is on a channel, messages matching that channel are enqueued to the channel with no validation by the enqueuing channel; it will be up to the destination channel itself to validate the address. So for instance if validatelocalnone were placed on the local channel, then incoming SMTP messages apparently matching the local channel would be accepted by the SMTP server and enqueued to the local channel; if the local part turned out not to be a valid account, that would not be discovered until the local channel itself actually ran and checked the local part.

Conversely, if the name space for some other destination channel, say a MRIF_A1 channel, happened to exactly match the name space for the accounts on the local channel, then placing validatelocalsystem on the MRIF_A1 channel would cause enqueuing PMDF agents such as the SMTP server to reject messages destined for the MRIF_A1 channel for which the local part (username) could not be validated as if it were a VMS MAIL account.