lees@briggs1.lbs.msu.edu (John Lees) (11/13/90)
We have a mail delivery problem on our 3B2-500s running 3.1.1 and
sendmail 4.12 (9/7/83) from Wollongong. The problem is that all
mail from off-site is delivered as "From root". The following line
begins with ">From", and has the correct address of the sender. The
remainder of the message is just fine. Example:
From root Mon Nov 12 17:47 EST 1990
>From freemacs-request@sun.soe.clarkson.edu Mon Nov 12 17:47:21 1990
The sendmail.cf uses this definition for the mailer:
Mlocal, P=/bin/mail, F=lsSMmh, S=10, R=10, A=mail $u
I thought the problem might be that there is no "-d" option to mail, as
I have seen on other systems, but adding this option results in no mail
bewing delivered at all. (BTW, freezing the sendmail.cf causes sendmail
to complain "out of memory" on its next invocation. Sheeesh.)
These machines were donated by AT&T, the software is no longer being
updated, et cetera. Thanks for any help!
- - - - M i c h i g a n S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y - - - - O
John Lees Instructor in Computer Science OoO
Graduate student Lyman Briggs School /O
Department of Philosophy College of Natural Science |
114 Justin Morrill Hall E-190 Holmes Hall (|) flower
East Lansing, MI 48824-1036 East Lansing, MI 48825-1107 USA _|_ power
lees@briggs1.lbs.msu.edu, lees@msuegr.bitnet, ...!uunet!frith!leesbruce@sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM (Bruce Lilly) (11/15/90)
In article <1990Nov13.141646.4032@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> lees@briggs1.lbs.msu.edu (John Lees) writes: >We have a mail delivery problem on our 3B2-500s running 3.1.1 and >sendmail 4.12 (9/7/83) from Wollongong. The problem is that all >mail from off-site is delivered as "From root". The following line >begins with ">From", and has the correct address of the sender. The >remainder of the message is just fine. Example: > > From root Mon Nov 12 17:47 EST 1990 > >From freemacs-request@sun.soe.clarkson.edu Mon Nov 12 17:47:21 1990 > [ ... ] 1) version 4.12 is ancient (it has the pre-Morris worm bugs!) 2) the "From " lines do not indicate where the message came from; the "From:" RFC-822 header does. The problem is in your mail user agent (MUA), not in sendmail (the MTA). I recommend getting sendmail 5.65 with IDA 1.3.5 enhancements, which is easily ported to System V. -- Bruce Lilly, Product Manager, | bruce@Broadcast.Sony.COM Digital Television Tape Recording, | uunet!{sonyusa,vmp}!sonyd1!bruce Sony, 3 Paragon Drive, Montvale, | lilb@sony.compuserve.com (slow) NJ 07645-1735 | Telephone: 1(201)358-4161 | FAX: 1(201)358-4089
andy@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Andy S Poling) (11/15/90)
In article <1990Nov13.141646.4032@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> lees@briggs1.lbs.msu.edu (John Lees) writes: >We have a mail delivery problem on our 3B2-500s running 3.1.1 and >sendmail 4.12 (9/7/83) from Wollongong. The problem is that all >mail from off-site is delivered as "From root". The following line >begins with ">From", and has the correct address of the sender. The >remainder of the message is just fine. Example: > > From root Mon Nov 12 17:47 EST 1990 > >From freemacs-request@sun.soe.clarkson.edu Mon Nov 12 17:47:21 1990 > >The sendmail.cf uses this definition for the mailer: > >Mlocal, P=/bin/mail, F=lsSMmh, S=10, R=10, A=mail $u > >I thought the problem might be that there is no "-d" option to mail, as >I have seen on other systems, but adding this option results in no mail >bewing delivered at all. (BTW, freezing the sendmail.cf causes sendmail >to complain "out of memory" on its next invocation. Sheeesh.) This is a long-standing problem with the /bin/mail on various SysV boxes. /bin/mail is adding the first From_ line and escaping the second one (which it doesn't do right anyway - it can still allow spoofing). /bin/mail can also cause people to be charged for receiving mail (not reading it) because it resets it's uid. I finally got fed up enough to write a no-frills program to bop mail into people's mailboxes. It doesn't do forwarding, or aliasing, but who cares. It was written for use with sendmail and thus doesn't try to add it's own From_ line. The command line is eminently simple: /usr/local/bin/delivermail username < mail_message A sample sendmail.cf Mlocal definition is Mlocal, Path=/usr/local/bin/delivermail, Flags= DFPSUsl, Sender=10, Recipient=11 Argv=delivermail $u There are no command-line flags. Sendmail (and, I believe, MMDF as well) provides all of the frills you could want already anyway. Actually, it does have one compile-time-enablable frill - I added the capability to "write" to the user's terminal whenever they receive mail if the user-execute bit on their tty is enabled. We are using it on our AT&T 3b4000 (SysVr3.1.5) with no apparent problems. It is, however, SysV-specific in that it uses lockf() instead of flock() and putenv(). It can be anon-FTPed from jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu (128.220.2.5) in pub/delivermail/shar.Z. I consider it a reasonable alternative to /bin/mail for use by sendmail. That's my solution... throw code at the problem :-) -Andy -- Andy Poling Internet: andy@gollum.hcf.jhu.edu UNIX Systems Programmer Bitnet: ANDY@JHUNIX Homewood Academic Computing Voice: (301)338-8096 Johns Hopkins University UUCP: uunet!mimsy!aplcen!jhunix!andy