sendmail, 4th Edition

Errors-To:

Error notification redirect sendmail, deprecated

Ordinarily, errors are bounced to the envelope sender. The Errors-To: header specifies the address, or addresses, to which sendmail should send additional notification of delivery errors.

The Errors-To: header is intended for use by mailing lists to prevent errors in a list from being rebroadcast to the list as a whole. For example, consider the mailing list allusers. Mail that is sent to this list should contain the following header lines:

To: allusers
From: allusers-submit
Errors-To: allusers-errors

The From: header allows reply mail to be submitted for distribution to the list. The Errors-To: header causes error notification to be sent to allusers-errors so that the maintainer can fix any errors in the list. The original sender also gets error notification unless the mailing list software represents the maintainer in the envelope (Reply Versus Bounce on page 492).

Under SunOS and V8 sendmail, the Errors-To: header is flagged in conf.c with the H_ERRORSTO header flag (H_ERRORSTO (Was H_ERRSTO) (V8.7 and Later) on page 1141). This allows other headers to be declared in that file as error redirect headers. Under pre-V8 SunOS sendmail, the Errors-To: header is ignored if the error mode set by the ErrorMode option is m (ErrorMode=m on page 1029).

Under V8 sendmail, the Errors-To: header is ignored unless the UseErrorsTo option (UseErrorsTo on page 1115) is true. It does this because the Errors-To: header violates RFC1123. Errors-To: ...