Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sm.unisys.com!ucla-cs!wales
From: wales@valeria.cs.ucla.edu (Rich Wales)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Using Sendmail "Oi" configuration option
Summary: DON'T DO IT or you'll break your SMTP server
Message-ID: <15841@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Date: 8 Sep 88 19:06:17 GMT
References: <15805@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Sender: news@CS.UCLA.EDU
Reply-To: wales@CS.UCLA.EDU (Rich Wales)
Organization: UCLA CS Department, Los Angeles
Lines: 26

In article <15805@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> I suggested the possibility of
adding an "Oi" line to our Sendmail configuration file, in order to
allow users to send mail with lines consisting of only a period.

It turns out that this is a *BAD* idea in the current Sendmail.  If you
do put "Oi" in your sendmail.cf, it will mess up your SMTP daemon.
(Look in the module "collect.c", for occurrences of the global Boolean
variable "IgnrDot" -- which is set by "Oi" in the configuration file,
and/or by a "-oi" command-line argument.  If "IgnrDot" is set, it will
bypass special "dot" processing, even when Sendmail is in SMTP mode.)

My personal feeling is that SMTP mode ought to be made to override "Oi"
in the Sendmail code.  And since I assumed this was utterly obvious, I
ended up misreading the relevant part of the Sendmail source when I
first looked at it.  (Sigh.)

Now that I realize that "Oi" will break SMTP, the only reasonable thing
to do is *not* to put an "Oi" line in our sendmail.cf after all -- but
rather to modify our user agent program to use a "-oi" command-line
argument when it invokes Sendmail.

Thanks to John Owens and Chris Torek for pointing the problem out to me.

-- Rich Wales // UCLA Computer Science Department // +1 (213) 825-5683
   3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, California 90024-1596 // USA
   wales@CS.UCLA.EDU      ...!(uunet,ucbvax,rutgers)!cs.ucla.edu!wales
   "Spiff's hyper-freem drive malfunctions!  The aliens close in!"