Sendmail, 3rd Edition

Pitfalls

• Macros that are given values while sendmail processes mail might not get the value expected. If that happens, careful hand-tracing of rule sets is required to find the fault.^[11] For example, the value in $g ($g) is the result of sender address rewriting and rewriting by the rule set that is specified in the S= equate of the selected delivery agent. Because $g is used to define the From: header line, errors in that line should be traced through errors in the S= equate’s rule set.

• Macros can have other macros as their values. The sendmail program expands macros recursively. As a consequence, prior to V8.10, unintentional loops in macro definitions could cause sendmail to appear to hang and to eventually segmentation-fault and core-dump. Beginning with V8.10, such recursion is caught and the following error is printed:

  configfile: line num: expand: recursion too deep (10 max)

^[11] Although use of the -d35.9,21.12 debugging command-line argument can help.