[net.mail] Strange message!

jis@hocsd.UUCP (04/12/84)

Can someone tell me how or why the enclosed mail was sent to me by 
pyuxbb!Postmaster? I have never ever sent any message to pyuxbb! While we
are at it, what is "unknown mailer error 255"? What on earth is
py/garage/hudson.DK?

Thanks.

Jishnu Mukerji
AT&T ISLab Holmdel

-------------------- begin forwarded message --------------------
>>From Postmaster@pyuxbb.UUCP  Wed Apr 11 23:32:13 1984 remote from cbosgd
Received: by cbosgd.UUCP (4.12/3.7)
	id AA02798; Wed, 11 Apr 84 23:32:13 est
Sent-By: pyuxbb.UUCP Wed Apr 11 17:25:16 1984
Date: Sun, 8-Apr-84 08:12:35 EST
>From: cbosgd!pyuxbb!Postmaster (Mail Delivery Subsystem)
Subject: Returned mail: unknown mailer error 255
Message-Id: <8404112225.AA17049@py/garage/pyuxbb.DK>
Received: from py/garage/hudson.DK by py/garage/pyuxbb.DK (1104.ggr/840315)
	id AA17049; 11 Apr 84 17:25:16 EST (Wed)
To: <cbosgd!ho95b!houxm!hogpc!pegasus!hocsd!jis>
To: hudson!Postmaster







-------------------- end of forwarded message --------------------

mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (04/13/84)

Unknown mailer error 255 means that uux exited with status -1, which usually
means that the next host was not in the L.sys file.  Sendmail expects
mailers to use <sysexits.h> exit codes to indicate why they failed,
and of course uux doesn't know about this Berkeley convention.
The garage name is for Datakit in PY.

My guess is that you (or a uucico that happened to be fired up when you
sent mail to somebody else) sent some mail through some related path,
it burped somewhere, and the error message got clobbered and wound up
being sent to you.  Normally the text of the message is also included,
but this one didn't seem to have any.

	Mark

ggr@hudson.UUCP (Guy Riddle) (04/16/84)

The problem was probably due to someone down here replying to one of your
netnews articles.

Most of our mail to the outside world is gated through our
DATAKIT VCS Network (hence the internal domain addresses like
py/garage/edsel.DK -- all addresses are hierarchical ASCII-strings
(no numbers) -- our exchanges are py/garage/ and py/lot/) to
one host which handles most of our uucp traffic.

It turns out our gateway host (py/garage/bentley (aka pyuxbb)) ran out
of space on the /usr file system that day, which is why uux returned
an error code of 255 and why the lengthy transcript that sendmail
usually returns on errors was absent.

Lots of UNIX software, including uucp and sendmail, falls apart
when /usr runs out of space.  [When was the last time you saw a program
check for an error on an fclose(3S)?]

			=== Guy Riddle == AT&T Bell Laboratories, Piscataway ===