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sendmail, 4th Edition
book

sendmail, 4th Edition

by Bryan Costales, Claus Assmann, George Jansen, Gregory Neil Shapiro
October 2007
Intermediate to advanced
1308 pages
161h 13m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from sendmail, 4th Edition

F=m

Allow delivery to multiple recipients All versions

Whenever the sendmail program executes the program specified by the P= delivery agent equate (P= on page 748), that program is given its argv vector as specified by the A= delivery agent equate (A= on page 738). As the last step in building that argv, sendmail appends one or more recipient addresses.

The decision as to whether it appends one address or many is determined by the F=m delivery agent flag. If this flag is absent, the delivery agent is given only one recipient. Otherwise, if it is present, the delivery agent can be given many recipients (subject to any limitation imposed by the MaxRecipientsPerMessage option, MaxRecipientsPerMessage on page 1050). In either case, if there are more recipients than argv can accept, the delivery agent is rerun as many times as is necessary to handle them all.

Note that sendmail is able to distinguish only between failures involving one, many, or all of the recipients when it is delivering with SMTP or LMTP. Otherwise, it judges delivery as successful if a zero exit(2) value is returned by a delivery agent. If the delivery agent fails to deliver to one of many recipients, it exits with a nonzero value, and because of that single failure, sendmail will presume that delivery to all recipients failed. If the error is temporary, this can result in duplicate delivery to each recipient listed prior to the bad recipient.

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596510299Errata Page