Sendmail 5 choking - producing blank header fields

From: Nibby, Dana (WT Chen) <"Nibby,>
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 07:34:40 -0500

Every so often, I need to send a bulk mailing to registrants of an
acquisitions mailing list; this can be anywhere from 100 addresses to
1000.

Occassionally, when sending these messages to the list via a small perl
script I've written, some recipients receive no body in the e-mail they
receive.

What could be going wrong? Am I overloading sendmail? To fix what I
suspected was the problem (sending too much to sendmail at once), I put
a delay of 10 seconds between each message submission to sendmail.
Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't; so I'm completely confused
about whether or not this even has an effect - or is it the humidity?
I'm baffled.

It's a tough problem to replicate. And a nasty problem in general,
because, it being acquisitions e-mail, it's crucial that all recipients
who've provided valid e-mail addresses receive their e-mail(s) - would
be unfair if some received them and some didn't.

Someone recommended that I use Majordomo - but as far as I know,
majordomo simply sends everything, brute force, to sendmail without any
intelligence. I've heard ListProc can give sendmail a breather - will
the free version of ListProc 6.0 do this? (does it even run on Digital
Unix 4.0?)

(There's something in the Majordomo FAQ about alpha users having
problems with Majordomo - what might those be?)

I don't quite need all the functionality of a full-blown mailing list
program; just need to ensure that members of a mailing list get the
e-mail I send them.
Maintenance of the mailing list itself is done by other scripts; it's
the delivery which is giving me a headache.

Any advice/pointers will be appreciated.

Thanks.

   - Dana
Received on Tue Nov 25 1997 - 13:49:58 NZDT

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