1 2 3 K N O W N B U G S I N S E N D M A I L 4 (for 8.6.5) 5 6 7The following are bugs or deficiencies in sendmail that I am aware of 8but which have not been fixed in the current release. You probably 9want to get the most up to date version of this from FTP.CS.Berkeley.EDU 10in /ucb/sendmail/KNOWNBUGS. 11 12* "SYSERR: openmailer(local): fd 1 not open" message 13 14 File descriptor 1 (standard output) should not be closed during normal 15 processing. This is checked periodically, and sometimes this condition 16 is found and this message is produced. Sendmail repairs the problem, 17 and the mail is still delivered, but I still don't know why it happens. 18 (There was a bug that was fixed in 8.6.beta.13 that might be related, 19 but I think this bug still exists.) 20 21* Null bytes are not handled properly. 22 23 Sendmail should handle full binary data. As it stands, it handles 24 any value from 0x01-0xFF in the body and 0x01-0x80 and 0xA0-0xFF in 25 the header. Notably missing is 0x00, which would require a major 26 restructuring of the code -- for example, almost no C library support 27 could be used to handle strings. 28 29* Route-addrs missing angle brackets. 30 31 There are cases where route-addrs do not get angle brackets around them, 32 such as in the "-r" flag on mailers or in the From_ line created when 33 mailing to files. 34 35* Duplicate error messages. 36 37 Sometimes identical, duplicate error messages can be generated. As 38 near as I can tell, this is rare and relatively innocuous. 39 40* No "exposed users" in "nullrelay" configuration. 41 42 The "nullrelay" configuration hides all addresses behind the mail 43 hub name. Some sites might prefer to expose some names such as 44 root. This information is always available in Received: lines. 45 46* $c (hop count) macro improperly set. 47 48 The $c macro is supposed to contain the current hop count, for use 49 when calling a mailer. This macro is initialized too early, and 50 is always zero (or the value of the -c command line flag, if any). 51 This macro will probably be removed entirely in a future release; 52 I don't believe there are any mailers left that require it. 53 54* If you EXPN a list or user that has a program mailer, the output of 55 EXPN will include ``@local.host.name''. You can't actually mail to 56 this address. It's not clear what the right behaviour is in this 57 circumstance. 58 59* REDIRECT aliases don't work with `n' option. 60 61 If you have option `n' set when you use newaliases and have 62 REDIRECT addresses in your aliases file, you'll get the error 63 messages during the newaliases instead of when email is sent to 64 the address in question. The workaround is to turn off the `n' 65 option. 66 67* MX records that point at non-existent hosts work strangly. 68 69 Consider the DNS records: 70 71 hostH MX 1 hostA 72 MX 2 hostB 73 hostA A 128.32.8.9 74 75 (note that there is no A record for hostB). If hostA is down, 76 an attempt to send to hostH gives "host unknown" -- that is, it 77 reflects out the status on the last host it tries, which in this 78 case is hostB, which is unknown. It probably ought to eliminate 79 hostB early in processing. 80 81* NAME environment variables with commas break. 82 83 If you define your NAME environment variable to have a comma 84 (e.g., ``Lastname, Firstname''), and you are using the $q definition 85 that uses ``name <address>'' format, sendmail treats the first and 86 last names as two addresses, thus producing a bogus From line. You 87 can work around this by changing the $q definition to use 88 ``address (name)''. 89 90* \231 considered harmful. 91 92 Header addresses that have the \231 character (and possibly others 93 in the range \201 - \237) behave in odd and usually unexpected ways. 94 95* SIGUSR1 may be buggy. 96 97 There has been one reliable report that the logging triggered by 98 SIGUSR1 was unreliable on HP-UX. I have been unable to reproduce 99 this problem at Berkeley. 100 101* DEC Alphas (OSF/1 1.3) sometimes time out on sending mail. 102 103 I have one report that DEC Alphas acting as SMTP clients sometimes 104 will apparently not see the "250 OK" message in response to the 105 dot that indicates the end of the message. This only happens if 106 the message is run from the queue -- if it gets through on first 107 try, everything is fine. I have been unable to reproduce this 108 problem at Berkeley. 109 110* accept() problem on SVR4. 111 112 Apparently, the sendmail daemon loop (doing accept()s on the network) 113 can get into a wierd state on SVR4; it starts logging ``SYSERR: 114 getrequests: accept: Protocol Error''. The workaround is to kill 115 and restart the sendmail daemon. We don't have an SVR4 system at 116 Berkeley that carries more than token mail load, so I can't validate 117 this. It is likely to be a glitch in the sockets emulation, since 118 "Protocol Error" is not possible error code with Berkeley TCP/IP. 119 120 I've also had someone report the message ``sendmail: accept: 121 SIOCGPGRP failed errno 22'' on an SVR4 system. This message is 122 not in the sendmail source code, so I assume it is also a bug 123 in the sockets emulation. (Errno 22 is EINVAL "Invalid Argument" 124 on all the systems I have available, including Solaris 2.x.) 125 126(Version 8.12, last updated 01/04/94) 127