Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!honey
From: honey@mailrus.cc.umich.edu (peter honeyman)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Non-root sendmail?
Message-ID: <786@mailrus.cc.umich.edu>
Date: 13 Nov 88 02:19:07 GMT
References: <756@hudson.acc.virginia.edu> <7902@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Sender: usenet@mailrus.cc.umich.edu
Reply-To: honey@citi.umich.edu (peter honeyman)
Organization: Center for Information Technology Integration, Univ of Michigan
Lines: 24

In article <7902@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Tso) writes:
>On to a more interesting sendmail question:  why is it that when
>sendmail invokes a pipe to a program, if it can resolve the sender of
>the mail message to a local user, it runs the program as that user?
>That seems to me to be completely wrong, since there's absolutely no
>authentication over an SMTP port --- this could be an easy way to
>breach security, even if the DEBUG command isn't there.  For example,
>the user may have been careless in a .forward or in the aliases file.

as to your question, i have no idea, of course, as i understand very
little about the hows and whys of sendmail, especially the latter, and
my understanding diminishes with each passing day.

that said, i wonder if that's why sendmail refuses to talk to itself.
does anyone have another theory as to why this might be?

	peter

ps:  i use "smtp talk to myself" all the time.  on my subnet, only one
machine, citi, does uucp, the rest of the machines smtp their uucp
requests to that machine.  (i didn't want to hack uucp to share
/usr/spool/uucp, although it's not that hard.)  the smtp queue *is*
shared, and (by coincidence) citi also runs that queue.  so citi
delivers to itself all the time.