kutz@bgsuvax.UUCP (Kenneth J. Kutz) (01/04/90)
Configuration: Vax 11/785 running MORE/bsd (based on 4.3BSD) using sendmail 5.61 ftp'd from Berkeley Just recently we have started administering a large mailing list. The machine which receives the mail message and then consequently disperses it to the rest of the list (kept in a file with a corresponding ':include filename' entry in /usr/lib/aliases) has the above configuration. The problem we are experiencing is that sometimes sendmail doesn't "remember" which hosts it has sent the message to and sends some messages more than once to the same user at the same host. Currently there are 120 people on the mailing list. I assume that when a message gets "deferred" or fails to be sent because of some interruption in service, it is then that we are ripe for multiple copies to hit the same recipient. If that message fails for the same reason on future tries, previous successful sends get sent again succesfully which irritates those folks who only like to read a message once :-) Is anyone else maintaining large mail lists with sendmail and experienced these same growing pains? I suppose the problem could be from the original sender site and not here given the problem is rather sporadic. It has happened 3 times in a month and a half. Thank you. -- Kenneth J. Kutz Internet kutz@andy.bgsu.edu Systems Programmer BITNET KUTZ@BGSUOPIE University Computer Services UUCP ...!osu-cis!bgsuvax!kutz Bowling Green State Univ. US Mail 238 Math Science, BG OH 43403
cfe+@andrew.cmu.edu (Craig F. Everhart) (01/04/90)
I wish I had isolated the specific thing that I did to address the problem. andrew.cmu.edu houses several 100+ recipient mailing lists. The problem in sendmail was that it would be called on to deliver mail to a whole long list; some deliveries would be successful, some not, but it wouldn't finish processing the entire list before it crashed or the machine was rebooted. Meanwhile, the qf* file hadn't been updated to remove the destination addresses for those deliveries that had been successful. What I did was to insist that sendmail update the qf* file after every successful delivery, and sync() the disk. There were only a couple of changes involved. Is there a substantial call for diffs (which might not be that useful since our local sendmail had diverged long ago)? Or is this diagnosis/treatment report sufficient? Or has the problem been solved in later versions of sendmail? Craig Everhart
paul@speedmetal.engin.umich.edu (Paul Killey) (01/05/90)
Is there still a setjmp/longjmp botch in the distributed sendmail? This is when it showed up ... on large mailing lists. There have been fixes from a couple sites ... mit and U-maryland maybe? Something about a 2 hour timer going off during sfgets() and trying to jump into some context that had been freed by another shorter timer in smtpinit()? I can't remember now. If you think that might be the problem I can send you some diffs for that, or maybe can find the older original message that discussed it. Just a thought. --paul "Don't call me baby when she's waiting in the car."