1 2 3 K N O W N B U G S I N S E N D M A I L 4 (for 8.6.9) 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. For descriptions of bugs that have been 11fixed, see the file RELEASE_NOTES (in the root directory of the sendmail 12distribution). 13 14This list is not guaranteed to be complete. 15 16 17* Null bytes are not handled properly. 18 19 Sendmail should handle full binary data. As it stands, it handles 20 any value from 0x01-0xFF in the body and 0x01-0x80 and 0xA0-0xFF in 21 the header. Notably missing is 0x00, which would require a major 22 restructuring of the code -- for example, almost no C library support 23 could be used to handle strings. Fixed (for the message body only) 24 in 8.7. 25 26* Duplicate error messages. 27 28 Sometimes identical, duplicate error messages can be generated. As 29 near as I can tell, this is rare and relatively innocuous. 30 31* No "exposed users" in "nullrelay" configuration. 32 33 The "nullrelay" configuration hides all addresses behind the mail 34 hub name. Some sites might prefer to expose some names such as 35 root. This information is always available in Received: lines. 36 37* $c (hop count) macro improperly set. 38 39 The $c macro is supposed to contain the current hop count, for use 40 when calling a mailer. This macro is initialized too early, and 41 is always zero (or the value of the -c command line flag, if any). 42 This macro will probably be removed entirely in a future release; 43 I don't believe there are any mailers left that require it. 44 45* If you EXPN a list or user that has a program mailer, the output of 46 EXPN will include ``@local.host.name''. You can't actually mail to 47 this address. It's not clear what the right behaviour is in this 48 circumstance. 49 50* REDIRECT aliases don't work with `n' option. 51 52 If you have option `n' set when you use newaliases and have 53 REDIRECT addresses in your aliases file, you'll get the error 54 messages during the newaliases instead of when email is sent to 55 the address in question. The workaround is to turn off the `n' 56 option. 57 58* MX records that point at non-existent hosts work strangly. 59 60 Consider the DNS records: 61 62 hostH MX 1 hostA 63 MX 2 hostB 64 hostA A 128.32.8.9 65 66 (note that there is no A record for hostB). If hostA is down, 67 an attempt to send to hostH gives "host unknown" -- that is, it 68 reflects out the status on the last host it tries, which in this 69 case is hostB, which is unknown. It probably ought to eliminate 70 hostB early in processing. 71 72* NAME environment variables with commas and unbalanced quotes break. 73 74 If you define your NAME environment variable to have a comma 75 (e.g., ``Lastname, Firstname''), and you are using the $q definition 76 that uses ``name <address>'' format, sendmail treats the first and 77 last names as two addresses, thus producing a bogus From line. You 78 can work around this by changing the $q definition to use 79 ``address (name)''. 80 81 If you have an unbalanced double quote (e.g., ``Firstname"Lastname'') 82 the auto-quoting algorithm breaks. 83 84* \231 considered harmful. 85 86 Header addresses that have the \231 character (and possibly others 87 in the range \201 - \237) behave in odd and usually unexpected ways. 88 89* DEC Alphas (OSF/1 1.3) sometimes time out on sending mail. 90 91 I have one report that DEC Alphas acting as SMTP clients sometimes 92 will apparently not see the "250 OK" message in response to the 93 dot that indicates the end of the message. This only happens if 94 the message is run from the queue -- if it gets through on first 95 try, everything is fine. I have been unable to reproduce this 96 problem at Berkeley. 97 98* accept() problem on SVR4. 99 100 Apparently, the sendmail daemon loop (doing accept()s on the network) 101 can get into a wierd state on SVR4; it starts logging ``SYSERR: 102 getrequests: accept: Protocol Error''. The workaround is to kill 103 and restart the sendmail daemon. We don't have an SVR4 system at 104 Berkeley that carries more than token mail load, so I can't validate 105 this. It is likely to be a glitch in the sockets emulation, since 106 "Protocol Error" is not possible error code with Berkeley TCP/IP. 107 108 I've also had someone report the message ``sendmail: accept: 109 SIOCGPGRP failed errno 22'' on an SVR4 system. This message is 110 not in the sendmail source code, so I assume it is also a bug 111 in the sockets emulation. (Errno 22 is EINVAL "Invalid Argument" 112 on all the systems I have available, including Solaris 2.x.) 113 114* Sending user deletion not done properly in :include: lists. 115 116 If you don't have the "m" (me too) option set, then a person 117 sending to a list that contains themselves should not get a copy 118 of the message. However, if that list points to a :include: file 119 that has one address per line, this will break, and the sender 120 will always get a copy of their own message, just as though the 121 "m" option were set. 122 123 You can eliminate this by adding commas at the end of each line 124 of the :include: file. 125 126* Excessive mailing list nesting can run out of file descriptors. 127 128 If you have a mailing list that includes lots of other mailing 129 lists, each of which has a separate owner, you can run out of 130 file descriptors. Each mailing list with a separate owner uses 131 one open file descriptor (prior to 8.6.6 it was three open 132 file descriptors per list). This is particularly egregious if 133 you have your connection cache set to be large. 134 135(Version 8.19, last updated 11/13/94) 136