jorgnsn@qucis.queensu.ca (John Jorgensen) (08/04/90)
I need to set up a mailing list so that error reports which occur when delivering to its recipients are directed to the list maintainer, instead of to the people who mail submissions to the list. I am running Sun's sendmail 4.0 on a Sun 3/160, SunOS 4.0.3. I started out with the following in /etc/aliases: list: :include:/staff/maintainer/list-members owner-list: list-request list-request: maintainer But that only mails to list-request when the error is discovered immediately by the sendmail process running on our mailhost. We relay our external mail through a neighbouring host, so most delivery errors are not detected by our mailer daemon. So, I went back to my collection of suggestions saved from USENET, and tried this: list: "|/usr/lib/sendmail -flist-request list-out" list-out: :include:/staff/maintainer/list-members owner-list: list-request owner-list-out: list-request list-request: maintainer Usually, this does show list-request on the UNIX From_ line, and it uses list-request as the sender when sendmail talks SMTP, but I'm not sure it does the job completely. First, when local users on our mailhost send to the list alias, their userids are NOT replaced by list-request on the From_ line, presumably because sendmail is run under their uids and they are not trusted users. Is there anything I can do about that, without making everyone a trusted user? Second, the outgoing messages don't have any "Sender: list-request@qucis.queensu.ca" header line, like the Sender: lines I see on messages I receive from Sun-managers and Sun-nets. How do I insert Sender: lines into messages sent to the list alias? Finally, one of my saved suggestions had this variation for the list alias: list: "|/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -flist-request list-out" The manual tells me that "-oi" causes sendmail to ignore dots in incoming messages, but I don't know when it is a good idea to do so. Could somebody enlighten this neophyte? Thanks a lot. John Jorgensen jorgnsn@qucis.queensu.ca (613) 545 6784 Systems Programmer, Dept. of Computing Science, Queen's University
lear@turbo.bio.net (Eliot) (08/05/90)
Sendmail makes it hard for you to do it right - what you would like to do is pipe the whole message back through sendmail to set the From_ line to list-request. So what you need is an additional address- list-dist that points to your include file. Ideally you would then change the list alias to be something like the following: list: "|/usr/lib/sendmail -flist-request" The problem you'll have is that sendmail won't let you use -f from aliases when mail originates locally. The cheap solution is to write a small setuid filter that merely calls sendmail. -- Eliot Lear [lear@turbo.bio.net]