Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!altnet!edc
From: edc@ALTOS.COM (Eric Christensen)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: ELM bug
Message-ID: <456@altnet.ALTOS.COM>
Date: 15 Jun 88 12:23:09 GMT
References: <98@cjsa.UUCP>
Reply-To: edc@altnet.UUCP (Eric Christensen)
Organization: Altos Computer Systems, San Jose, CA.
Lines: 43

In article <98@cjsa.UUCP> jeff@cjsa.UUCP (C. Jeffery Small) writes:
>
>Now that we are starting to get the ELM group whipped into shape, I have
>one problem I want to raise.  We are running version 1.5 here and I have
>found that if you send a mail message and then Quit ELM quickly thereafter,
>the message gets killed before it gets spooled up for uucp transmission.

Ah! Surprise, surprise, surprise! You're /bin/mail (or sendmail, or whatever
you're using for a delivery agent) catches a signal and terminates when it's
parent dies. (Incidently, this is really a very stupid thing for a mail delivery
agent to do :-( ) I've seen this with various versions of Xenix 3.? and V7. I
also have seen it in at least one port of System V. 

If you have source for your delivery agent, it's realativly easy to fix up
with a signal call. If not, here's a couple of untried, untested ideas:

1)	Change elm so that it calls (for example) "nohup /bin/mail ...." for
	local delivery. (You shouldn't have to worry about uux, but then again, you
	really shouldn't have to worry about /bin/mail either).

2)  Write a stupid little program that elm calls as a mail agent. It really
	doesn't have to be very smart.. just read it's arguments and it's   
	standard input, and pass it all through to /bin/mail. The important part
	is that you ignore the software termination signal. Depanding on what    
	your running, and whose port of unix/xenix/*ix this may be accomplished
	in different ways. What I've found to be most portable (even to real, real
	wierd stuff like Eunice and Unos) is to fork the child and wait for it's
	completion. That way, even if the parent terminates, the child just becomes
	a zombie and finishes it's job. With *some* systems you can do it all by
	just catching and ignoreing SIGHUP.

Hope this helps out a bit.  It appears that all this is taken care of in 1.7,
but I don't have the 1.5 sources around anywhere handy to compare it to.

-- 
+-------------------------+---------------------------------------------------+
| Eric D. Christensen     | Email: edc@altnet.altos.com  (uunet!altnet!edc)   |
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| San Jose, Ca. 95131     |                 Feature - A Documented Bug        |
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