Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!fletcher
From: fletcher@cs.utexas.edu (Fletcher Mattox)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Problems with group list syntax
Keywords: group list
Message-ID: <7036@cs.utexas.edu>
Date: 14 Oct 89 15:42:16 GMT
References: <6166@b11.ingr.com>
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 38

In article <6166@b11.ingr.com> nancy@b11.ingr.com (Nancy Buehmann) writes:
>My sendmail program has problems dealing with addresses that have a group
>list syntax.  A user at my site is on a distribution list that has a group 
>list syntax of the form "listname:;@host.domain".  Messages sent to this 
>list are delivered to this user, but then sendmail sends back an "Unable
>to deliver mail" error message back to the originator. 
> 
>After reading (and being confused by) Section 6.2.6 in RFC 822, I thought
>that group lists could only have the form "listname:[mailbox];".  Thus,
>I don't understand the "@host.domain" part of the list name given above.

Do you, by chance, have the C flag specified in your mailer definition?
That's the flag which appends "@host.domain" to an address when sendmail
thinks it has received a non-FQDN from the sender.

I'll bet the address arrived at your host (or perhaps an intermediate
sendmail host which uses the C flag) with a

	To: listname:;

in the headers.

The problem is that sendmail uses a quick heuristic, instead of
a real 822 parser, to determine when to append the "@host.domain":
If there is no @ in the address, sendmail appends.

I've removed the C flag in my mailer definitions until I get
a chance to fix sendmail (a quick fix to handle group lists is
trivial).

>Sendmail's test mode shows that addresses like "a:b;", "a:b;@c", "a:;@c",
>and "a:;" all resolve to a mailer okay.  The user's address in the 
>distribution list is correct. 

Sendmail -bt will not show the effects of the C flag, if memory
serves me.

Fletcher