Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!kyle
From: kyle@uunet.UU.NET (Kyle Jones)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Sendmail delivery to a full filesystem?
Message-ID: <121546@uunet.UU.NET>
Date: 6 Feb 91 19:00:13 GMT
References: <9102061846.AA08875@lilac.berkeley.edu>
Organization: UUNET Communications Services, Falls Church, VA
Lines: 14

In article <9102061846.AA08875@lilac.berkeley.edu> lwv27@CAS.BITNET writes:
 > One of the fellows learning sendmail here just ran a test where sendmail
 > was called to deliver mail to a user whose mailbox was on a 110% full filesystem
 > Instead of the message being returned to the sender, it disappeared.
 > 
 > What has to be turned on to get sendmail to do reasonable
 > error handling?

sendmail doesn't do final mail delivery, so the problem is most
likely /bin/mail.  Long ago I remember noting with some surprise
that /bin/mail didn't check the return value of the writes to the
mailbox.  Ideally it should truncate the mailbox to its previous
length and exit(EX_TEMPFAIL) if a write fails, but the version I
hacked long ago didn't do either of these things.