[comp.mail.sendmail] Sendmail converts prognames to lowercase.

fll@dde.dk (Flemming Lau) (04/04/91)

I beleive that my problem must have been found and solved by someone
so I will confide my problems to you.

I have the original Berkely 5.61 sendmail.

My local mailer does not have the 'u' flag (do not map to lowercase) set.

My prog mailer does have the 'u' flag set.

I have a command defined in .forward to deliver my mail. This
command contains uppercase.

When mail is delivered without queueing everything works fine.

When the queue is scanned by the daemon or by a call with -q, 
something strange happens:

The command found in .forward is converted to lowercase
and the excute fails since the command cannot be found.

I have traced through the sources
and I found that it is the local mailer's flags which are
used when deciding whether to map to lowercase. 

In the procedure 'recipient' the mapping is performed if the
username is not an alias using the local mailers 
flags. Just after that one finds out that this is for the 
progmailer to handle and replaces the mailer????

Is this a feature or if it is an error does anyone know 
where to fix it ?

________________________________________________________________________
I   - Obviously people living under such a system are not happy.       I
I   - They just think they are.                                        I
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I Flemming Lau                      Tel: int +45 42 84 50 11 (UTC + 1) I
I Dansk Data Elektronik A/S         Fax: int +45 42 84 52 20           I
I Herlev Hovedgade 199              Telex: 35258 dde dk                I
I DK-2730 Herlev, Denmark           E-mail:  fll@dde.dk                I
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e07@nikhefh.nikhef.nl (Eric Wassenaar) (04/11/91)

In article <1991Apr4.114126.2153@dde.dk>, fll@dde.dk (Flemming Lau) writes:
> My local mailer does not have the 'u' flag (do not map to lowercase) set.
> My prog mailer does have the 'u' flag set.
> [ ..... ] During queue runs:
> The command found in .forward is converted to lowercase
> and the excute fails since the command cannot be found.

The mapping to lowercase is not very consistent. It is rather
complicated to analyze exactly when and why such mappings are done.
If you don't have the mailer flag 'u' turned on, you will probably
have no big surprises.

The easiest fix to always retain the case in "|ProGram" recipients
is to let the routine makelower() in util.c NOT do the conversion
to lower case within quoted strings.
This fix is present in the IDA variants (and trivial to implement
if you don't use IDA).
You then don't need the 'u' flag in the prog mailer.

Eric Wassenaar
-- 
Organization: NIKHEF-H, National Institute for Nuclear and High-Energy Physics
Address: Kruislaan 409, P.O. Box 41882, 1009 DB Amsterdam, the Netherlands
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