whm@megaron.UUCP (09/28/86)
We recently encountered some strange behavior from sendmail and after
looking into it for a while, I still don't have a good guess as to
what might have happened.
We've got a mailing list with about 100 addresses on it that is expanded
via a :include: in /usr/lib/aliases. A message was sent to the list and
the addresses were split into several groups. For each group of addresses
except one, the message was normally sent. For the other group however,
sendmail sent 10-15 copies of the message to some of the addresses. It
appears that when things are working properly, if sendmail can't send
a message to all the addresses named in a qf file, it leaves those addresses
in the file and removes the others. In this case, something went wrong.
I was originally thinking that the problem might be a core dump -- sendmail
would get to address X, croak, and then try it all over again, but this
hypothesis doesn't seem to work because sendmail locks a queue item and
if it dies, you just get a locked queue item with no associated sendmail.
I forgot to mention it, but all the mail was being sent via SMTP on the
Internet.
We're hesitant to reactivate the list since we really don't have a clue
as to what went wrong. Has anyone encountered this problem or anything
similar? Any suggestions?
Bill Mitchell
whm@arizona.edu
{ihnp4,noao,mcnc,utah-cs}!arizona!whm