[comp.mail.sendmail] Sendmail delivery to a full filesystem?

lwv27@CAS.BITNET (02/07/91)

One of the fellows learning sendmail here just ran a test where sendmail
was called to deliver mail to a user whose mailbox was on a 110% full filesystem
Instead of the message being returned to the sender, it disappeared.

What has to be turned on to get sendmail to do reasonable error handling?
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Larry W. Virden                 UUCP: osu-cis!chemabs!lwv27
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kyle@uunet.UU.NET (Kyle Jones) (02/07/91)

In article <9102061846.AA08875@lilac.berkeley.edu> lwv27@CAS.BITNET writes:
 > One of the fellows learning sendmail here just ran a test where sendmail
 > was called to deliver mail to a user whose mailbox was on a 110% full filesystem
 > Instead of the message being returned to the sender, it disappeared.
 > 
 > What has to be turned on to get sendmail to do reasonable
 > error handling?

sendmail doesn't do final mail delivery, so the problem is most
likely /bin/mail.  Long ago I remember noting with some surprise
that /bin/mail didn't check the return value of the writes to the
mailbox.  Ideally it should truncate the mailbox to its previous
length and exit(EX_TEMPFAIL) if a write fails, but the version I
hacked long ago didn't do either of these things.