Flow of addresses through the rewrite rules in sendmail 8.8

Introduction

However, this guide isn't up-to-date. Therefore, I'll try to outline the flow of addresses through the rewrite rules based on debugging sendmail 8.8 with -bs -d21.1 .

Just as a reminder, the parts of an (E)SMTP dialogue which are important here are:
MAIL From:<sender@address>
to specify the sender's address, and
RCPT To:<rcpt@address>
to specify the recipient's address, of which multiple can be given.

MAIL From

3, 0, 4

to do a basic check of the address and find the mailer for the statistic program. If the address resolves to the $#error mailer, the address is rejected.

3, 1, 4

This is stuff as explained in the doc. But why doesn't it use the outcome of ruleset 3 from the previous rewriting (as done below)? Is this something special with my test addresses? (I used local and off-site addresses).

check_mail

This is the new hook of sendmail 8.8.

RCTP To

3, 0

to do a basic check of the address and find the mailer to use for delivery.

2, R= , 4

The input for these rules is the result of ruleset 3. R= is taken from the mailer found before. This is again the usual stuff as explained in the doc.

check_rcpt

This is the new hook of sendmail 8.8.