Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!ucsd!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!glasgow!Jim From: jim@cs.strath.ac.uk (Jim Reid) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,mail.uk-sendmail-workers Subject: sendmail woes with unix-niftp Message-ID: <8808181414.AA22546@stracs.cs.strath.ac.uk> Date: 18 Aug 88 14:26:32 GMT Sender: daemon@cs.glasgow.ac.uk Lines: 35 X-mailer: mail gatewayed to news (mail-news 1.5a) Our spool filesystem got filled up one weekend with an enormous number of identical "temporary" files for incoming mail. We traced this down to sendmail's feature of considering lines beginning with a dot as end of file. It should come as no surprise that the failing mail contained just such a line. When this mail was passed to sendmail, it took everything up to the line with the dot and then went away. This caused unix-niftp to get a SIGPIPE which it duly returned to the sending mail site as a temporary mailer error, causing them to re-send the mail and so repeating the cycle until the disk space ran out. This can be fixed by setting sendmail's i option to ignore lines containing dots. There are two ways to do this. The first is just to add a line "Oi" to sendmail.cf. This works, but will break SMTP mail which uses this dot at the start of line convention to mean end of data. The other way is for unix-niftp to invoke sendmail with an extra argument of -oi. This meant tweaking the mailfmt structure entry for sendmail in niftp/lib/gen/conf.c. Here's how it should look: struct mailfmt mailfmt[CONF_MAX] = { ............ { "sendmail", "%s -t", "%s -ba -oi -oMs%s", ADD_TO | ADD_SUBJ | ADD_BLANK}, ............ } [To Piete Brooks: please see this hack gets intergrated into the unix-niftp master sources.] Note that simply editing the MAILPROG entry in /etc/niftptailor will have disastrous results. This causes unix-niftp to use its own mailer that ends up calling sendmail with the wrong arguments, so screwing up all incoming JANET mail! Jim