Sendmail, 3rd Edition

Pitfalls

• Prior to V8 sendmail, if the list of recipients contained an address that began with any of the prescanned switches, sendmail would wrongly view that recipient as a switch during its prescan phase. For example, mail to joe, bill, -Cool caused sendmail to try to use a file named ool as its configuration file.

• Command-line switches must precede recipient addresses. Switches that are mixed in with recipient names are treated as recipient addresses.

• Old versions of sendmail (including IDA and some versions of BSD) would syslog(3) a warning if the old frozen configuration file didn’t exist. The V8 and SunOS versions of sendmail no longer check for a frozen configuration file, so nothing is ever logged about this.

• Prior to V8 sendmail, unknown command-line switches were silently ignored. Therefore, sending mail from a shell script could fail for reasons that were difficult to find. For example, specifying the preliminary hop count wrongly with -j, instead of correctly with -h, caused your presetting of the hop count to be silently ignored.

• Some old BSD and SunOS versions of sendmail set the default sender’s full name from the environment variable NAME even when running as a daemon or when processing the queue. This can lead to the superuser’s full name occasionally showing up wrongly as a sender’s full name. IDA and V8 sendmail clear the full name in -bd and -q modes but use different methods. To prevent this problem under other versions of sendmail, the env(1) program can be ...