porphano@hobbes.sfc.lehigh.edu (Paul A. Orphanos) (10/26/90)
Hi folks, I've had this persistent small problem with Sendmail on our system. We got the one from Berkeley, and set it up with no problems. Everything seems to work fine except for one thing. When a local user addresses a message, and mistypes the address (causing a nslookup failure), the message just sits in the mail queue, and is not sent back to the user. So what I do now is look at the queue, and if there's a bad message, I delete it and send the text back to the user, telling him it was a bad address. Otherwise, he/she'd never know. The sendmail.cf file seems to be ok (as far as I can tell, which probably is'nt much), and I'm wondering if any of you have run into this. Am I missing something from my .cf file? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Alot, Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Paul A. Orphanos Internet: porphano@hobbes.sfc.lehigh.edu Microelectronics Laboratory Bitnet: pao0@lehigh.bitnet Lehigh University Bethlehem, Pa. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Paul A. Orphanos Internet: porphano@hobbes.sfc.lehigh.edu Microelectronics Laboratory Bitnet: pao0@lehigh.bitnet Lehigh University
rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) (11/01/90)
In article <1211@lehi3b15.csee.Lehigh.EDU> porphano@hobbes.sfc.lehigh.edu (Paul A. Orphanos) writes: >Hi folks, > I've had this persistent small problem with Sendmail on our system. >We got the one from Berkeley, and set it up with no problems. >Everything seems to work fine except for one thing. When a local user >addresses a message, and mistypes the address (causing a nslookup >failure), the message just sits in the mail queue, and is not sent The behavior that concerns you is actually the correct behavior. Sendmail is designed to bounce the mail when the nameserver returns NXDOMAIN (non-existent domain), but not for a name lookup failure. A name lookup failure may be the result of a temporary network problem which makes access to the nameservers for the destination zone to be unavailable. It is appropriate in this case to queue the message and keep trying. I believe you will find that the message eventually bounces after two or three days of trying. You may be suffering from a different problem. Recently there were some bogus NAMESERVER records around which caused nameservers to indicate failure for addresses that should have been returned with NXDOMAIN. Your nameserver may be suffering from this problem. If it is, you may need to kill your nameserver and restart it, for those bogus records had rather long TTL times. Note that recent bind releases have provided nameservers which do not purge their cache on restart (kill -HUP), so you will need to actually kill and restart if you have such a nameserver. -- =*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*=*= Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science <rickert@cs.niu.edu> Northern Illinois Univ. DeKalb, IL 60115. +1-815-753-6940