Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!bpa!manta!brant
From: brant@manta.pha.pa.us (Brant Cheikes)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: smail combined with sendmail
Message-ID: <471@manta.pha.pa.us>
Date: 1 Mar 89 02:09:59 GMT
Reply-To: brant@manta.pha.pa.us (Brant Cheikes)
Organization: Soul of the Gnu Machine, Philadelphia
Lines: 23

I recently installed sendmail (5.58) and reconfigured smail2.5 to
serve as sendmail's UUCP front and back end.  So /bin/rmail continues
to be linked to /bin/smail, but now rmail/smail is supposed to call
sendmail to parse headers and determine proper message disposition.
Yet the manual page for smail(8) notes:

          As distributed, 'bang' mail that is not bound for a local
          recipient will be passed directly to uux without calling
          sendmail.

Would someone please explain the rationale for this behavior?  This
strikes me as a design error, as it prevents sendmail from performing
its routine header manipulation.  In particular, because sendmail
never sees the message, a "received" trace header never gets added
(smail apparently fails to do that itself, in this case).  This is a
valuable piece of information which should not be left out.

Now I can go in and hack the smail source, but I'd like to know if
there are any reasons not to.
-- 
Brant Cheikes
University of Pennsylvania, Department of Computer and Information Science
brant@manta.pha.pa.us, brant@linc.cis.upenn.edu, bpa!manta!brant