Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!reading!bru-cc!andrew
From: andrew@cc.brunel.ac.uk (Andrew Findlay)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Using Sendmail "Oi" configuration option
Message-ID: <458@Terra.cc.brunel.ac.uk>
Date: 9 Sep 88 15:52:34 GMT
References: <15805@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU>
Reply-To: Andrew.Findlay@brunel.ac.uk (Andrew Findlay)
Organization: Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK
Lines: 37

In article <15805@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> wales@CS.UCLA.EDU (Rich Wales) writes:
>....
>Further investigation revealed (not surprisingly) that our Sendmail con-
>figuration file did *not* have the "Oi" configuration option set.  As
>best I can figure out from reading the documentation and the source, the
>"Oi" option disables the "period is EOT" logic and causes Sendmail to
>treat a line with only a period exactly like any other line of text.
>
>It seems, then, that the best thing for us to do is to add an "Oi" line
>to our Sendmail configuration file.  However, before I go ahead and do
>this, I would like to double-check with the net readership in order to
>find out whether there are any hidden problems with doing this.  For

If you set Oi in the config file it will apply to *all* messages received
by Sendmail. This will probably wreck the SMTP function, so your incoming
Internet/Ethernet mail will stop working.

The 'correct' solution is to include the flag '-oi' in the command line
when your user-interface program invokes Sendmail.

We had a similar problem with our (UK-specific) Coloured-Book mail
system. All was fine until one day a message came in that had a single dot
alone on a line. Sendmail took that to be end-of-message and closed the
pipe. The FTP system that had received the message file took that as an error
and in five minutes time it tried the whole thing again... The '-oi' flag
fixed the problem.

The 'period-is-EOT' behaviour in Berkeley Mail is a separate issue, and
is configurable in .mailrc.

Andrew
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