Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!deccrl!news.crl.dec.com!nntpd.lkg.dec.com!netrix.nac.dec.com!lan_csse From: lan_csse@netrix.nac.dec.com Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail Subject: "Forward to " in .forward mishandled. Keywords: forward Message-ID: <22524@shlump.lkg.dec.com> Date: 8 May 91 15:44:08 GMT Sender: news@shlump.lkg.dec.com Reply-To: jc@sppip7.lkg.dec.com Organization: Digital Equipment Lines: 53 Well, I don't know if this is a bug or a feature, but it did just waste an hour or so of several people's time, and it'd be nice to know if there is a feasible solution or if we just mark it up as Yet Another Bizarreness. The systems involved are assorted DEC Ultrixes, releases 3.1 thru 4.1, on VAX and MIPS hardware. The sendmail.cf files are pretty close to what is on DEC's distribution tapes. A fellow here decided that a particular pseudo-user on all our machines ("nm", our Network Manager) should support a mailing list. One of the time-honored ways of doing this is via the $HOME/.forward file, so he created such a file for nm: echo Forward to u1.m1.lkg.dec.com, u2.m2.nac.dec.com >.forward and so on. He did a test message, and it failed. His machine uses the sendmail daemon, and when we did a bunch of tests, after getting past all the confusion of deciphering the "Mail -v" output, we eventually realized that the problem was that sendmail was telling m1 to send the mail to: RCPT To: and m1 had no user "Forward to u1", so it failed. We deleted the "Forward to" from the .forward file, and it worked fine. Now, despite the fact that we know a workaround, we are somewhat miffed by the fact that every other mailer we can find handles the "Forward to" in the obvious ways. If we use the uucp/att mailers, the originating mailer strips it off. If sendmail talks to a DECnet mailer, the recipient mailer strips it off. But if it is sendmail at both ends, it fails because neither has the sense to discard the "Forward to". Despite the claim that sendmail is so horribly complicated because it is such a super intelligent mailer, it seems to be the only one lying about that fails to treat these two words as comments. Or is it? Sendmail is of course configurable like you wouldn't believe, so it seems likely that there's something that can be done in sendmail.cf that would tell it to discard these English comments like other mailers do. Maybe we could even get it to discard equivalent phrases in other languages. But damned if I can find anything in TFM that hints at how one might go about making the change. Is there a way to get sendmail to behave in the obvious manner here? Is it possible for a mere human to understand how to do it? Or are we stuck with just documenting that "Forward to" should not be used if sendmail is involved? Am I wasting my time even asking? Please answer by email if possible and I'll try to summarize (if I can make sense of the answers). This news access is somewhat tenuous, and I'm not sure I'll see posted answers. BTW, don't bother telling me about /usr/lib/aliases; I am quite familiar with it. The argument that "Method X doesn't need to work because method Y is available" does not impress me at all. If sendmail reads the .forward file at all, it should process it correctly, and "correctly" in this case means being compatible with the other mailers that use it. If this is indeed configurable, then the default setup should be compatible with the other mailers.