rad@puffin.uss.UUCP (01/29/87)
Every once in a while a message will be handed to sendmail that has an unbalanced '"' in one of the headers. This gives sendmail indigestion because when it generates error mail, it re-parses the header and generates *another* message. This recursion continues until all machines that were implicated (sender, gateway, homes of support people) are up to the max load average the particular daemon was configured for, and the mail queue just continues to grow. The only way I know to stop one of these fires is to SIGSTOP the sendmail daemon on every machine involved, and then go and manually delete every copy of the offending message from the mail queues before starting the daemons back up. This is a real inconvenience. The remedy sometimes has to be repeated a time or two, as reflections from remote machines come back. Am I missing something? Maybe there's a magic cookie that goes in the sendmail.cf to control this (he said, hopefully). Richard