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From: paul@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu (Paul Pomes - UofIllinois CSO)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: problem in sendmail
Message-ID: <1991May21.185716.19281@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 21 May 91 18:57:16 GMT
References: <1991May21.165028.7296@topaz.ucq.edu.au>
Sender: usenet@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Reply-To: Paul-Pomes@uiuc.edu
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Lines: 27

phong@topaz.ucq.edu.au writes:

>I am creating a distribution list (a file)  which contains a number of
>usernames, so that when I mail to this distribution list all the user who 
>listed in this list will receive a copy of the message. This works fine, but
>as this list get bigger problem occurs, it no longer work. It seems that
>sendmail only accepts to  deliver to a certain numbers of recipients and 
>it won't work if you try to send to a large number of users at once.

Is this user list in your local .mailrc or Elm aliases file?  If so it
may be a limitation of your user agent.  If instead the address list
is :include: or stored in /etc/aliases (/usr/lib/aliases), the problem
is likely to overflow of the alais size limit.  DBM limits the size of
the key-value pair to 1024 bytes minus some number of bytes overhead (10?).
Older sendmail binaries ommited the size of the key in their reports of
the longest alias.  If your largest alias is close to 1000 bytes long,
try breaking it up into multiple entries.  The entries can be chained 
together or listed in a master alias.

If all the recipients are listed in the message headers, you may be hitting
the 4096 byte limit sendmail imposes on header length.

/pbp
--
Paul Pomes, Computing Services Office
University of Illinois - Urbana
Email to Paul-Pomes@uiuc.edu