Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!unido!pbinfo!michael From: michael@uni-paderborn.de (Michael Schmidt) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail Subject: Re: Problem: mail spool area and .forward on different machines Message-ID: Date: 8 Nov 90 14:55:32 GMT References: <5476@uqcspe.cs.uq.oz.au> <926@iiasa.UUCP> <1990Nov1.102200@ap.co.umist.ac.uk> <2549@ztivax.UUCP> Sender: news@uni-paderborn.de (News Uni-Paderborn) Organization: Uni Paderborn, Germany Lines: 42 In-Reply-To: lbo@ztivax.UUCP's message of 7 Nov 90 08:53:16 GMT Nntp-Posting-Host: athene >>>>> About Re: Problem: mail spool area and .forward on different >>>>> machines, Dr Lothar Borrmann said: Dr> In article Dr> michael@uni-paderborn.de (Michael Schmidt) writes: > >We have ONE mail directory mounted on all machines, we are using. We >do local delivery to make "mail user" work (although we encourage to >use the full domain address). ... > >You have to ensure, that all mailers involved respect the same lock. >... Dr> I think there is one more problem involved here: Don't you run Dr> into trouble when a local mailer wants to do "local delivery" to Dr> the central mail directory via the network, and the net (or the Dr> node holding the mail directory) is temporarily down? Sure. But first, the central mail host is conseidered to be down very seldom. Then all mail from outside gets delivered on this hosts. So no mail from outside will be returned. And the last thing is, that local delivery is the exception, just for convenience (remember, that we encourage the use of the full domain address, which causes the mail to be dropped on the central mail host. Dr> I mean, the usual thing to do would be to hold the message in Dr> the sendmail queue but standard binmail (the usual local Dr> delivery agent) was not programmed to behave that way. So Dr> in this case the mail delivery would fail and the message would Dr> be returned to the sender, wouldn't it ? Yes. Sad, but true. Dr> (I once hacked binmail to behave differently but never had time Dr> to test this thing ...) That'd be great. Returning somthing like EX_TEMPFAIL instead of EX_UNAVAILABLE (or whatsoever). -- Michael Schmidt, FB 17, Uni-GH Paderborn, Warburgerstr. 100, D-4790 Paderborn, West Germany Mail: michael@pbinfo.UUCP or michael@uni-paderborn.de