K N O W N B U G S I N S E N D M A I L (for 8.6.5) The following are bugs or deficiencies in sendmail that I am aware of but which have not been fixed in the current release. You probably want to get the most up to date version of this from FTP.CS.Berkeley.EDU in /ucb/sendmail/KNOWNBUGS. * "SYSERR: openmailer(local): fd 1 not open" message File descriptor 1 (standard output) should not be closed during normal processing. This is checked periodically, and sometimes this condition is found and this message is produced. Sendmail repairs the problem, and the mail is still delivered, but I still don't know why it happens. (There was a bug that was fixed in 8.6.beta.13 that might be related, but I think this bug still exists.) * Null bytes are not handled properly. Sendmail should handle full binary data. As it stands, it handles any value from 0x01-0xFF in the body and 0x01-0x80 and 0xA0-0xFF in the header. Notably missing is 0x00, which would require a major restructuring of the code -- for example, almost no C library support could be used to handle strings. * Route-addrs missing angle brackets. There are cases where route-addrs do not get angle brackets around them, such as in the "-r" flag on mailers or in the From_ line created when mailing to files. * Duplicate error messages. Sometimes identical, duplicate error messages can be generated. As near as I can tell, this is rare and relatively innocuous. * No "exposed users" in "nullrelay" configuration. The "nullrelay" configuration hides all addresses behind the mail hub name. Some sites might prefer to expose some names such as root. This information is always available in Received: lines. * $c (hop count) macro improperly set. The $c macro is supposed to contain the current hop count, for use when calling a mailer. This macro is initialized too early, and is always zero (or the value of the -c command line flag, if any). This macro will probably be removed entirely in a future release; I don't believe there are any mailers left that require it. * If you EXPN a list or user that has a program mailer, the output of EXPN will include ``@local.host.name''. You can't actually mail to this address. It's not clear what the right behaviour is in this circumstance. * REDIRECT aliases don't work with `n' option. If you have option `n' set when you use newaliases and have REDIRECT addresses in your aliases file, you'll get the error messages during the newaliases instead of when email is sent to the address in question. The workaround is to turn off the `n' option. * MX records that point at non-existent hosts work strangly. Consider the DNS records: hostH MX 1 hostA MX 2 hostB hostA A 128.32.8.9 (note that there is no A record for hostB). If hostA is down, an attempt to send to hostH gives "host unknown" -- that is, it reflects out the status on the last host it tries, which in this case is hostB, which is unknown. It probably ought to eliminate hostB early in processing. * NAME environment variables with commas break. If you define your NAME environment variable to have a comma (e.g., ``Lastname, Firstname''), and you are using the $q definition that uses ``name
'' format, sendmail treats the first and last names as two addresses, thus producing a bogus From line. You can work around this by changing the $q definition to use ``address (name)''. (Version 8.11, last updated 12/22/93)