Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!wls
From: wls@uwm.edu (Bill Stapleton)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Intermittent .forward problem
Message-ID: <1990Aug23.135914@uwm.edu>
Date: 23 Aug 90 18:59:14 GMT
References: <9012@ur-cc.UUCP> <9015@ur-cc.UUCP> <9023@ur-cc.UUCP>
Sender: news@uwm.edu
Reply-To: wls@uwm.edu (Bill Stapleton)
Organization: Computing Services, U of Wisc-Milwaukee
Lines: 32

In article <9023@ur-cc.UUCP>, msir@sulu.cc.rochester.edu (Mark Sirota) writes:
> In article <9012@ur-cc.UUCP> I write:
> > Sometimes, and I do mean sometimes, our sendmail seems to be ignoring
> > .forward files, and delivering locally instead.
> 
> I really appreciate all the mail I'm getting regarding this problem.  It's
> unfortunate that almost everyone is answering a question that I didn't ask.
> Let me try to rephrase it.

I'm no sendmail guru, but since nobody's hit it yet, here's a blast from our
past that might apply:

We had a problem with sendmail behaving differently depending on whether the
mail was sent immediately or queued (at busy times) and sent later.  In
particular, it would pick up a program spec from a users' .forward (like
"|vacation") and if it wasn't queuing, it would execute the program as the
user who owned the .forward, ie the "to" user (right).  But if the mail was
queued for later, it ended up executing the program as the user sending the
original message, ie the "from" user (wrong).  This was fixed here, but I'm
not sure if the problem/fix was reported elsewhere.

There's also a related problem that we haven't fixed:  If two users in a list
have the exact same thing in their .forward file (say "|vacation"), one of them
gets dropped as being a duplicate (wrong).  We're still running 5.61 here;  Has
this problem been fixed in a later version?

Anyways, I hope this is of some help to somebody...

--
Bill Stapleton
     wls@csd4.csd.uwm.edu
     uwmcsd4!wls