[net.news.sa] mailing lists with sendmail

lmc@cisden.UUCP (Lyle McElhaney) (03/13/86)

OK, sendmail fans, I've got a good one for you. I am (supposed to be)
running a mailing list for UNIX security matters. I'm trying to get the
list back up, and am having trouble using sendmail as it is advertized.

The security mailing list has ~260 addressees.  Formerly, at denelcor, our
mail machine was running system III, so sendmail was unavailable and I
therefore had to send out 260 copies of everything to be sent to the
list, even when 250 of those copies went to a single neighbor.  However, I
understand that sendmail has the ability to send one copy to each
downstream site and allow that site to copy the message to each site
addressed downstream from there, and so on.  Right so far?

Now that I am running from a 4.2bsd machine (Sun 2/170, actually) I would
like to set it up that way. Experimenting has gotten me nowhere, I can't
seem to make it happen with simple, straight forward unix addresses.
What's the secret?

I have the mailing list addresses in "arpa" style, i.e.:

	cosell@bbn-labs-b.arpa
	crash!bblue@ihnp4
	encore!wegrzyn@ihnp4
	whuxlg!esm@ihnp4
	lzma!mkg@ihnp4
	nrh@inmet
	fidder@isucs1
	zaiaz!bill@jett

Our sendmail.cf is set up to append ".uucp" if domain is not given, and a
shell script is called by sendmail which looks up the site in a pathalias
database and calls uux.

Any ideas out there as to why sendmail (can't, won't) perform as
advertized?  Any help appreciated. I'll certainly post what I learn.

Lyle McElhaney
...cisden!lmc