[17276] in Athena Bugs
Re: Jonathon Weiss: forwading broken on athena workstations
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tom Coppeto)
Mon Oct 18 10:05:12 1999
Message-Id: <199910181405.KAA22621@melbourne-city-street.MIT.EDU>
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1999 10:10:25 -0400
To: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@mit.edu>
From: Tom Coppeto <tom@MIT.EDU>
Cc: postmaster@mit.edu, network@mit.edu, bugs@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <199910160733.DAA14246@speaker-for-the-dead.mit.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
There's little consistency between your two messages. I hope I've captured
the core of the complaints.
We're looking into the mailer-daemon problem and one of the solutions may
be to update the clients to use a non-null sender. Normally, industry
practice is not to allow off campus machines to use campus mailers (which
we do) and this unfortunately conflicts with these types of messages. It
sounds like if there's a release in the works, then we should talk to
release enginering. The right fix for this is still unclear.
For mailers running non-mit.edu domains, we don't support this. We've been
fairly consistent that while we don't police this activity, we will not go
out of our way to make this work. I think this is such a case. Mailers
representing sub-domains of mit.edu, such as lcs or media, do direct delivery.
- Tom
At 03:33 AM 10/16/99 -0400, Jonathon Weiss wrote:
>
>I'd appreciate it if someone could reply to the bug report I submitted
>below (preferably cc-ing bugs). This bug in concert with the fact
>that outgoing doesn't accept bounces with a null envelope from, is
>currentlt causing users to lose mail. I currently expect that on
>Tuesday night a patch release will go out that will cause athena
>machines to send bounces with an envelope-from of
>MAILER-DAEMON@machine.mit.edu (sendmail has a mailer flag for this
>behavior despite the fact that it is a technical violation of RFC
>1123). I'd really like to have a reply available for users who
>a) want to know how to forward mail from an athena workstation, and
>b) want to know what happened to their last two weeks of mail (I think
>all we can tell them is to look in /var/tmp/dead.letter, assuming it
>is still there.)
>
> Jonathon
>
>
>------- Forwarded Message
>
>Message-Id: <199910120832.EAA01181@stratton-fourty-eight.mit.edu>
>From: Jonathon Weiss <jweiss@MIT.EDU>
>To: postmaster@MIT.EDU
>Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU, tritan@MIT.EDU, mark@MIT.EDU, tom@MIT.EDU, kretch@MIT.EDU,
> ops@MIT.EDU
>Subject: forwading broken on athena workstations
>Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 04:32:49 EDT
>Sender: jweiss@MIT.EDU
>
>
>Sorry for the duplicates, I got bitten by a linux-athena
>serndmail.cf-ism, that I wasn't expecting.
>
>It is no longer possible to have a local address on an athena
>workstation that forwards its mail off the machine. The problem is
>that if I set jweiss@tla.mit.edu to forward to jweiss@mit.edu (or even
>jweiss@foo.org since all outgoing mail from an athena wirkstation will
>go thru outgoing.mit.edu) and someone sends mail with an envelope from
>that is not in the mit.edu domain to jweiss@tla.mit.edu, mcs will
>bounce it when tla tries to forward it on. (Right now most of these
>bounces are probably being lost, because of the problem I reported on
>Saturday night, where bounces bounce.)
>
>Additionally, if there are any local aliases on an athena workstation
>(eg. postmaster) these will bounce unless owner-foo exists for every
>list foo (which makes sendmail re-write the envelope from to
>owner-foo).
>
>tritan has already been hit by this problem, tho I don't know if he
>lost any mail or not, since some of it was queuing on his machine, and
>I didn't examine it to figure out why (though I think he is running a
>non-athena-release sendmail binary). I suspect the only reason I
>haven't run into the problem is that none of the people on my machine
>get mail addressed to the machine very often.
>
>ops, this also affects mail from offsite to things like
>postmaster@menelaus.mit.edu.
>
>This is a serious problem and I believe it needs to be addressed by
>postmaster@mit.edu.
>
> Jonathon
>
>
>------- End of Forwarded Message
>
