2 sendmail glitches

From: Matt Harrington <matteo_at_dnai.com>
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 1999 15:50:13 -0400

Glitch 1:
---------
With sendmail 8.9.3 (and earlier versions) I have the following
problem: my mail server and NFS server are 2 different machines. All
accounts have home directories on the NFS server and the mail server
mounts filesystems when needed. When a disk dies on the NFS server
email does not get delivered to accounts which were on the dead disk.
At first I thought this was because sendmail tried to mount the disk
looking for a .forward file, so I configured sendmail to look in
/usr/local/etc/forwards on the mail server with this option:

O ForwardPath=/usr/local/etc/forwards/$u.forward

What's strange is that it doesn't appear (from "df") that the mail
server is trying to mount the dead disk, but mail isn't delivered to the
affected accounts.

I am doing all of this so that users can still get mail via POP even
when their home directory is unavailable. Any ideas on why mail doesn't
get delivered?

Glitch 2:
---------

I have several mailing lists on the mail server. When sendmail can't
deliver a message to all accounts (because of Glitch 1 above), the
message goes back into the queue. The problem is that sendmail rewrites
the recipient list to include the problem accounts >and< a random number
of accounts which already received the message. The effect is that
certain users get hundreds of copies of mail from the mailing lists.
This appears to be a bug in sendmail. Any ideas on how to get sendmail
to rewrite the recipient list properly?


Matt Harrington
UCSF
415-476-4628

P.S. I know that sendmail doesn't actually deliver the mail once it has
reached its destination. I don't know how /bin/mail works into the
picture.
Received on Fri Apr 23 1999 - 19:53:03 NZST

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