[comp.mail.uucp] rejecting mail for a DEAD link, sendmail.cf question?

perry@vu-vlsi.UUCP (Rick Perry) (03/13/88)

   Is there something I can add to sendmail.cf, or perhaps somewhere else,
so that mail to vu-vlsi!ge-mc3i!user would get sent back to the sender
with some kind of message like 'ge-mc3i: node dead!'  We have ge-mc3i
declared DEAD in the distributed map entry, and it's been dead for
many months now, but several messages per week come in for ge-mc3i, sit
around for a week, then uuclean deletes them but notifies only me, not the
sender.

   If I simply remove ge-mc3i from our L.sys & map entries, the mail would
get forwarded to the smail SMARTHOST, bpa, which would probably re-route
it back to here, possibly causing one of those almost infinite loops I've
seen a few times in the past; or if bpa knew that vu-vlsi was not a path
to ge-mc3i it might send it to rutgers, and I assume somewhere along the
line a message might be returned to the sender.

   What I'd like to do though is have it, possibly with the body of the
message deleted, sent immediately back to the sender when it arrives here.

   (ge-mc3i is a Sun at General Electric, they have a bad disk and can't
get it fixed for some silly adminis$trative reasons or something...)

   (we are a Pyramid 90x, OSx4.1, using BSD4.3 uucp, smail2.3)

...Rick			perry@vu-vlsi.UUCP, perry@vuvaxcom.BITNET

Dr. Rick Perry, Department of Electrical Engineering
Villanova University, Villanova, PA 19085, 215-645-4969, -4970