1 2 3 K N O W N B U G S I N S E N D M A I L 4 (for 8.6.7) 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. 24 25* Duplicate error messages. 26 27 Sometimes identical, duplicate error messages can be generated. As 28 near as I can tell, this is rare and relatively innocuous. 29 30* No "exposed users" in "nullrelay" configuration. 31 32 The "nullrelay" configuration hides all addresses behind the mail 33 hub name. Some sites might prefer to expose some names such as 34 root. This information is always available in Received: lines. 35 36* $c (hop count) macro improperly set. 37 38 The $c macro is supposed to contain the current hop count, for use 39 when calling a mailer. This macro is initialized too early, and 40 is always zero (or the value of the -c command line flag, if any). 41 This macro will probably be removed entirely in a future release; 42 I don't believe there are any mailers left that require it. 43 44* If you EXPN a list or user that has a program mailer, the output of 45 EXPN will include ``@local.host.name''. You can't actually mail to 46 this address. It's not clear what the right behaviour is in this 47 circumstance. 48 49* REDIRECT aliases don't work with `n' option. 50 51 If you have option `n' set when you use newaliases and have 52 REDIRECT addresses in your aliases file, you'll get the error 53 messages during the newaliases instead of when email is sent to 54 the address in question. The workaround is to turn off the `n' 55 option. 56 57* MX records that point at non-existent hosts work strangly. 58 59 Consider the DNS records: 60 61 hostH MX 1 hostA 62 MX 2 hostB 63 hostA A 128.32.8.9 64 65 (note that there is no A record for hostB). If hostA is down, 66 an attempt to send to hostH gives "host unknown" -- that is, it 67 reflects out the status on the last host it tries, which in this 68 case is hostB, which is unknown. It probably ought to eliminate 69 hostB early in processing. 70 71* NAME environment variables with commas break. 72 73 If you define your NAME environment variable to have a comma 74 (e.g., ``Lastname, Firstname''), and you are using the $q definition 75 that uses ``name <address>'' format, sendmail treats the first and 76 last names as two addresses, thus producing a bogus From line. You 77 can work around this by changing the $q definition to use 78 ``address (name)''. 79 80* \231 considered harmful. 81 82 Header addresses that have the \231 character (and possibly others 83 in the range \201 - \237) behave in odd and usually unexpected ways. 84 85* DEC Alphas (OSF/1 1.3) sometimes time out on sending mail. 86 87 I have one report that DEC Alphas acting as SMTP clients sometimes 88 will apparently not see the "250 OK" message in response to the 89 dot that indicates the end of the message. This only happens if 90 the message is run from the queue -- if it gets through on first 91 try, everything is fine. I have been unable to reproduce this 92 problem at Berkeley. 93 94* accept() problem on SVR4. 95 96 Apparently, the sendmail daemon loop (doing accept()s on the network) 97 can get into a wierd state on SVR4; it starts logging ``SYSERR: 98 getrequests: accept: Protocol Error''. The workaround is to kill 99 and restart the sendmail daemon. We don't have an SVR4 system at 100 Berkeley that carries more than token mail load, so I can't validate 101 this. It is likely to be a glitch in the sockets emulation, since 102 "Protocol Error" is not possible error code with Berkeley TCP/IP. 103 104 I've also had someone report the message ``sendmail: accept: 105 SIOCGPGRP failed errno 22'' on an SVR4 system. This message is 106 not in the sendmail source code, so I assume it is also a bug 107 in the sockets emulation. (Errno 22 is EINVAL "Invalid Argument" 108 on all the systems I have available, including Solaris 2.x.) 109 110* Sending user deletion not done properly in :include: lists. 111 112 If you don't have the "m" (me too) option set, then a person 113 sending to a list that contains themselves should not get a copy 114 of the message. However, if that list points to a :include: file 115 that has one address per line, this will break, and the sender 116 will always get a copy of their own message, just as though the 117 "m" option were set. 118 119 You can eliminate this by adding commas at the end of each line 120 of the :include: file. 121 122* Excessive mailing list nesting can run out of file descriptors. 123 124 If you have a mailing list that includes lots of other mailing 125 lists, each of which has a separate owner, you can run out of 126 file descriptors. Each mailing list with a separate owner uses 127 one open file descriptor (prior to 8.6.6 it was three open 128 file descriptors per list). This is particularly egregious if 129 you have your connection cache set to be large. 130 131(Version 8.18, last updated 03/14/94) 132