Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!blake!hubert From: hubert@blake.acs.washington.edu (Steve Hubert) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail Subject: Re: error handling on mail lists Message-ID: <3632@blake.acs.washington.edu> Date: 14 Sep 89 18:25:18 GMT References: <6872@cs.utexas.edu> Reply-To: hubert@cac.washington.edu (Steve Hubert) Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 56 In article <6872@cs.utexas.edu> fletcher@cs.utexas.edu (Fletcher Mattox) writes: >Unless I'm mis-reading the code, it looks to me like the >"owner-" error hack doesn't work when mail to a list of >all local users arrives via SMTP and one of those users >doesn't exist. > >An example: > >/usr/lib/aliases on somehost.edu looks like: > ># blurfl doesn't exit, joe and bob do. >foolist: joe,blurfl,bob >foolist-owner: postmaster > >Someone on otherhost.edu mails to , he >gets back a "550 foolist: User unknown", but foolist-owner >is not notified of the error nor is mail delivered to joe >and bob. This is in contrast to what happens when the same >mail originates on somehost.edu. > >At least this is the behaviour I see with a heavily hacked 5.59. >I'd like to hear someone else confirm it before I try to fix it. > >Fletcher I don't think the workarounds to send the errors to the right user are sufficient. To clarify slightly, here is what is happening in the case of two sendmails communicating with each other: The sending sendmail on otherhost sends: RCPT To: and waits for an answer. The server sendmail on somehost.edu finds foolist in aliases and runs into the blurf address. It sends back the message: 550 blurf... User unknown The local sendmail sees the 550 and marks the address *foolist* as unknown. It doesn't notice that the message was about blurf, not foolist. The local sendmail has no choice now but to return this to the original sender. The message isn't delivered to anyone. So what should have happened? Should the server have said anything about blurf being a bad address? The local sendmail didn't even ask about blurf, it just asked about foolist. It seems to me that foolist is a good address and the server shouldn't have returned any 550 error at all. Instead, it should have sent the blurf error to foolist-owner and delivered to all the other good addresses, just like Fletcher says happens when the mail originates on somehost. Has anyone done the modifications to make that happen? Steve Hubert hubert@cac.washington.edu Networks and Distributed Computing, Univ. of Washington, Seattle