tanner@ki4pv.uucp (Dr. T. Andrews) (02/20/88)
It happens that today I was watching my UUCP log, and what should
appear but mail to "ki4pv_mailer_daemon". Now, of course there is no
such person, and so the message was bounced without human intervention.
Examination of the message showed that the message had made 7 trips
between here and another site, where it also bounced.
Our (xenix) mailer-daemon unfortunately makes error messages appear
to be from "sysname_mailer_daemon" where "sysname" is replaced by the
local system name. If a "bounce" message generated by this daemon gets
bounced on its way back home, then you can wind up with an infinite
ping-pong loop.
The solution here was to patch the old /usr/lib/mail/execmail file to
plug "sysname!postmaster" instead of "sysname_mailer_daemon", though
you could also define a "falias" for the mailer daemon. In fact, you
should have a "postmaster" falias already on your system, and most of
the world knows to send complaints to "postmaster", so the following
patch is the goods. Note that "fddt" should be available from the
sources archives.
If you have "fddt", under SCO 2.2 patch at location 5b46:
fddt /usr/lib/mail/execmail
d5b46 # shows "_mailer_daemon"
e5b46 # will prompt for data
21 70 6f 73 74 6d 61 73 74 65 72 00 # "!postmaster\0"
^D # or local EOF
--
{allegra clyde!codas decvax!ucf-cs ihnp4!codas killer}!ki4pv!tanner