comp.mail.sendmail Frequently Asked Questions

Last Update (of this local copy) 1997-04-02

There is now a HTML version at sendmail.org. This version isn't updated anymore.

Posted-By: auto-faq 3.1.1.2
Archive-name: mail/sendmail-faq/part1


URL: http://www.his.com/~brad/sendmail/index.html


                	  comp.mail.sendmail
                    Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
                      Last updated March 24, 1997

           Copyright 1996, by Brad Knowles, all rights reserved


This FAQ is edited and maintained by Brad Knowles brad@etext.org.
The official archive for all FAQs posted to news.answers
is ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/, with many known
mirrors.  On this site, the latest version of this FAQ can be found
in ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/mail/sendmail-faq/.
Since this server tends to be extremely busy, as an alternative,
you might want to try using http://www.imc.org/sendmail-faq-1
and http://www.imc.org/sendmail-faq-2 instead.

If you don't have access to FTP or WWW, this FAQ can be retrieved by
sending Internet email to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with an empty
subject line (it gets ignored) and the command "send
usenet/news.answers/mail/sendmail-faq/part*" as the body of the
message (omitting the quotes, of course).

As an alternative, you might want to try sending Internet email
to info@imc.org with an empty subject line (it gets ignored)
and "send sendmail-faq-*" as the body of the body of the message
(again, omitting the quotes).

Additional alternative access methods are detailed within.


This FAQ is in RFC 1153 digest format.  The "Date:" field of each
entry represents the date of the last update made to that entry.


This FAQ has now been split into two parts, to try and make it easier
to pass through older or less capable news or mail gateways.


The intent is to ultimately make this document more web-friendly (in
that all original work is done in SGML), and using the linuxdoc-sgml
tools, automatically generate both the HTML and ASCII text versions,
automatically posting the ASCII version to comp.mail.sendmail as
appropriate.

In the meanwhile, all pseudo-HTMLized versions of this FAQ are
considered unsupported.  We cannot be held responsible for what
someone else's program does to this document in an attempt to
make it more web-friendly.  Nevertheless, the Landfield Hypertext
Usenet FAQ Archive seems to work well, and if you must access
the comp.mail.sendmail FAQ via the web, try slinging over to
http://www.landfield.com/faqs/mail/sendmail-faq/.


Comments/updates should be sent to sendmail-faq@etext.org.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date:March 24, 1997
Subject:Table of Contents

Table of Contents
=================

    PART ONE
    ========

 0.  TO DO
     1.  COPYRIGHT NOTICE / REDISTRIBUTION REQUIREMENTS
    2.  INTRODUCTION / MISCELLANEOUS
         2.1   What is this newsgroup?
         2.2   What is the scope of this FAQ?
         2.3   Where can I find the latest version of this FAQ?
         2.4   How do I access comp.mail.sendmail by email?
         2.5   Where can I ask email-related DNS questions?
         2.6   How can I subscribe to these newsgroups?
         2.7   Which version of sendmail should I run?
         2.8   What is the latest release of sendmail?
         2.9   Where can I find it?
         2.10  What are the differences between Version 8 and other
                versions?
         2.11  What's the best platform for running sendmail?
         2.12  What is BIND and where can I get the latest version?
         2.13  What is smrsh and where can I get it?
         2.14  What is smap and where can I get it?
         2.15  What is TCP-Wrappers and where can I get it?
         2.16  Why won't db 1.85 build for my SGI running Irix >= 5.2?
         2.17  What is makemap and where can I get it?

    3.  VERSION 8 SPECIFIC ISSUES
         3.1   How do I make all my addresses appear to be from a single
                host?
         3.2   How do I rewrite my "From:" lines to read
                ``First_Last@My.Domain''?
         3.3   So what was the user database feature intended for?
         3.4   Why are you so hostile to using full names for email
                addresses?
         3.5   Where do I find this user database (UserDB) code?
         3.6   How do I get the user database to work with Pine or
                with FEATURE(always_add_domain)?
         3.7   How do I manage several (virtual) domains?
         3.8   There are four UUCP mailers listed in the configuration
                files.  Which one should I use?
         3.9   How do I fix "undefined symbol inet_aton" and "undefined
                symbol _strerror" messages?
         3.10  How do I solve "collect: I/O error on connection" errors?
         3.11  Why can't my users forward their mail to a program?
         3.12  Why do connections to the SMTP port take such a long time?
         3.13  Why do I get "unknown mailer error 5 -- mail: options
                MUST PRECEDE recipients" errors?
         3.14  Why does version 8 sendmail panic my SunOS box?
         3.15  Why does the "From " header gets mysteriously munged
                when I send to an alias?
         3.16  Why doesn't MASQUERADE_AS (or the user database) work
                for envelope addresses as well as header addresses?
         3.17  How do I run version 8 sendmail and support the MAIL11V3
                protocol?
         3.18  Why do messages disappear from my queue unsent?
         3.19  When is sendmail going to support RFC 1522 MIME header
                encoding?
         3.20  Why can't I get mail to some places, but instead
                always get the error "reply: read error from
                name.of.remote.host"?
         3.21  Why doesn't "FEATURE(xxx)" work?
         3.22  How do I configure sendmail to not use DNS?
         3.23  How do I get all my queued mail delivered to my Unix
                box from my ISP?


    PART TWO
    ========

    4.  GENERAL SENDMAIL ISSUES
         4.1   Should I use a wildcard MX for my domain?
         4.2   How can I set up an auto-responder?
         4.3   How can I get sendmail to deliver local mail to
                $HOME/.mail instead of into /usr/spool/mail (or
                /usr/mail)?
         4.4   Why does it deliver the mail interactively when I'm
                trying to get it to go into queue only mode?
         4.5   How can I solve "config error: mail loops back to
                myself" messages?
         4.6   Why does my sendmail process sometimes hang when
                connecting over a SLIP/PPP link?
         4.7   How can I summarize the statistics generated by
                sendmail in the syslog?
         4.8   How can I check my sendmail.cf to ensure that it's
                re-writing addresses correctly?
         4.9   What is procmail, and where can I get it?
         4.10  How can I solve "cannot alias non-local names" errors?

    5.  VENDOR/OS SPECIFIC SENDMAIL ISSUES
         5.1   Sun Microsystems SunOS/Solaris 1.x/2.x
             5.1.1  How can I solve "line 273: replacement $3 out of
                    bounds" errors?
             5.1.2  How can I solve "line 445: bad ruleset 96 (50 max)"
                    errors?
             5.1.3  Why does version 8 sendmail (< 8.7.5) sometimes
                    hang under Solaris 2.5?
             5.1.4  Why can't I use SunOS/Solaris to get email to
                    certain large sites?
         5.2   IBM AIX
             5.2.1  The system resource controller always reports
                    sendmail as "inoperative".  What's wrong?
             5.2.2  Why can't I use AIX to get email to some sites?
             5.2.3  Why can't I get sendmail 8.7.1 to use MX records
                    with AIX 3.2.5?

    6.  ADDITIONAL INFORMATION SOURCES (RFC 1807 bibliography format)
        6.1   Reference material devoted exlusively to sendmail
        6.2   Reference material with chapters or sections on sendmail
        6.3   Reference material on subjects related to sendmail
        6.4   World-wide web index pages on sendmail
        6.5   World-wide web index pages Internet email in general
        6.6   Online tutorials for sendmail
        6.7   Online archives of mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups,
                relating to Internet email

     7.  THANKS!
------------------------------

Date:January 17, 1997
Subject: Q0 -- TO DO list

* Make the FAQ more web-friendly by writing it in SGML and using
    the linuxdoc-sgml tools to automate the generation of the HTML
    and ASCII text versions.
* Index
* Additional net resources (web pages, anonymous ftp sites, etc...)
* Larger, more clearly written annotated bibliography (including RFCs
    and comments/corrections for books specific to sendmail)
* Reorganize by platform/version of sendmail (All Sun questions in one
    section, all AIX questions in another, etc...)

------------------------------

Date:May 28, 1996
Subject: Q1 -- COPYRIGHT NOTICE / REDISTRIBUTION REQUIREMENTS

    The entire contents of this document are copyright 1996 by Brad
Knowles, all rights reserved.

    This document may be freely distributed for non-profit purposes
(including, but not limited to: posting to mailing lists, Usenet
newsgroups, and world-wide-web pages; inclusion on CD-ROM or other
distribution media; and insertion into text retrieval systems), so
long as it is the latest version available at the time, all parts are
distributed together, and it is kept completely intact without
editing, changes, deletions, or additions.  Non-profit redistribution
in accordance with these guidelines does not require contact with or
approval from the copyright holder.

    Redistribution of this document for profit without express prior
permission is not allowed.  At the very least, expect to provide the
copyright holder a free copy of the product (exactly as it would be
sold to customers, all distribution media intact), or a percentage of
the gross revenue from said product and sufficient proof that the
integrity and completeness requirements set for non-profit
distribution will be met.


    In the event that the copyright holder discovers a redistributed
version that is not in compliance with the above requirements, he will
make a good-faith effort to get it corrected or removed, and failing
that, at least note its deprecated status in a new version.  Legal
action will likely be taken against redistribution for profit that
is not in compliance with the above requirements.

------------------------------

Date:May 28, 1996
Subject: Q2.1 -- What is this newsgroup?

    The Usenet newsgroup comp.mail.sendmail is dedicated to the
discussion of the program named "sendmail" in all its various forms.
It is most commonly found on computers running a flavor of the
Operating System known as Unix, or derived from Unix.

    This program has been ported to other OSes, but those versions
have typically been ported by a particular vendor and are considered
proprietary.  There are many versions of sendmail, but the original
author (Eric Allman) is continuing development on a particular version
typically referred to as "Version Eight" or sometimes just "V8".  This
is considered by many to be the One True Version.  This is also the
version that this FAQ is centered around.


    If you have a question that amounts to "How do I send mail to my
friend?", then you're in the wrong newsgroup.  You should first check
with your System or E-Mail Administrator(s), BBS SysOp(s), etc...
before you post your question publicly, since the answer will likely
be very highly dependant on what software and hardware you have.  You
also don't want to embarass yourself publicly, nor do you want to
annoy the kinds of people who are likely to be the counterparts of
your System or E-Mail Administrator(s), BBS SysOp(s), etc....  If
asking them doesn't do you any good, make sure you read this FAQ and
the other mail-related FAQs at the archive sites listed below.

    If you have a question about another program similar to sendmail
(technically referred to as an "SMTP MTA"), an SMTP Gateway package,
or a LAN email package, then you should see if there is another group
in the comp.mail hierarchy that more closely matches the
particular program you want to ask a question about.  For example, the
SMTP MTA known as Smail has comp.mail.smail dedicated to it.
The Mail User Agent (MUA) Eudora has two newsgroups dedicated to it
(comp.mail.eudora.mac and comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows),
depending on which hardware platform you use.  If there isn't a more
appropriate newsgroup, try comp.mail.misc.  Again, make sure
your question isn't already addressed in one of the mail-related
FAQs or other available documentation.  See the IMC website (more
info below) for a good list of mail-related FAQs.


    If you have a question about an older or vendor-proprietary
version of sendmail, be prepared for a lot of answers that amount to
"Get V8".  Version 8 isn't a panacea, but it does solve many problems
known to plague previous versions, as well as having many new features
that make it much easier to administer large or complex sites.  In
many cases, it makes at least possible what was previously virtually
impossible, and relatively easy the previously difficult.


    There are, of course, many alternative programs that have sprung
up in an attempt to answer one or another weakness or perceived fault
of sendmail, but so far, none of them have had the kind of success it
would require to unseat it as the de facto standard program for
sending Internet mail.  Obviously, this forum should not be used to
discuss the merits of any of the alternative programs versus sendmail.
These kinds of discussions should be taken to comp.mail.misc,
or you should agitate to get a new newsgroup or newsgroup hierarchy
created where that sort of thing is acceptable (or even the norm, such
as a comp.mail.advocacy or comp.mail.mta.advocacy
newsgroup).

------------------------------

Date:July 9, 1996
Subject: Q2.2 -- What is the scope of this FAQ?

    This FAQ is strongly centered around version 8 sendmail, for many
reasons.  First and foremost, this is the area of most interest on the
part of the maintainer of this FAQ.  Secondly, version 8 is where most
of the additional development is being concentrated.  Version 8
sendmail is also the best documented of all SMTP MTAs, by virtue of
the book by Bryan Costales (see entry
sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/1-56592-056-2 in Q6.1).

    Other versions of sendmail get mentioned in passing, and some
interesting interactions between version 8 and various OSes is also
covered.

    This FAQ is aimed primarily at the experienced Unix System
Administrator/Postmaster/DNS Domain Administrator.  If you're looking
for introductory texts, see the references in Q6.1.


    Where I've provided URLs, I've generally tried to keep them
exactly as they should be entered, without line breaks or anything
else.  This may make them or the surrounding text ugly, but hopefully
they'll be easier to cut-and-paste, or just click on once I've got an
HTMLized version.  However, this has not been possible in the
bibliography section, since I'm trying to adhere to RFC 1807
guidelines, and they explicitly require lines to be no longer than 79
characters.  In those cases, I've tried to break the lines at
relatively obvious and innocuous places.

------------------------------

Date:January 21, 1997
Subject: Q2.3 -- Where can I find the latest version of this FAQ?

    I post changes as they occur to my sendmail FAQ support page
at http://www.his.com/pub/brad/sendmail/.

    The ASCII text of my private version can be found at
ftp://ftp.his.com/pub/brad/sendmail/sendmail-faq/part*, while
the latest "single part" version before the split can be found at
ftp://ftp.his.com/pub/brad/sendmail/sendmail-faq/old.  I don't
have an HTMLized version yet, but when I do, I will put in a link
to it from my support page as well as updating this document.


    The official version (as posted to news.answers) is in
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/mail/sendmail-faq/.

    The Internet Mail Consortium http://www.imc.org
maintains an archive of email related FAQs and many other
documents.  On their site, the latest version of this FAQ
can be found in http://www.imc.org/sendmail-faq-1 and
http://www.imc.org/sendmail-faq-2.


    Unfortunately, the parser for the Ohio State semi-official
pseudo-HTMLized version tends to misinterpret the way I provide
URLs, so I no longer support it or provide the URL for this FAQ at
that site.  However, Kent Landfield has put together an alternative
web archive of Usenet FAQs, and it appears to parse things in a
more sensible manner.

    The root of the Landfield FAQ archive is at
http://www.landfield.com/faqs/, and the comp.mail.sendmail FAQ
can be found at http://www.landfield.com/faqs/mail/sendmail-faq/.

    The Landfield Usenet Hypertext FAQ Archive supports full text
searching with multiple ways to access Usenet's Frequently Asked
Question postings.  Hyperlinks are enabled where ever possible to
make references easy to follow.  A full set of FAQ statistics is
also available.


    If you don't have access to FTP or WWW, this FAQ can be
retrieved by sending Internet email to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu
with an empty subject line (it gets ignored) and the command "send
usenet/news.answers/mail/sendmail-faq/part*" as the body of the
message (omitting the quotes, of course).

    Since this server tends to be extremely busy, as an alternative,
you might want to try sending Internet email to info@imc.org with
an empty subject line (it gets ignored) and "send sendmail-faq-*"
as the body of the body of the message (again, omitting the quotes).


    Well known mirrors for the FAQs archived at rtfm.mit.edu can be
found at:

    Continent	URL
    ---------	-------------------------------------------
    North	ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/rtfm/usenet/
    America	ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/
                ftp://ftp.seas.gwu.edu/pub/rtfm/
                http://www.landfield.com/faqs/
    Europe	ftp://ftp.uni-paderborn.de/pub/FAQ/
                ftp://ftp.Germany.EU.net/pub/newsarchive/news.answers/
                ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/usenet/
                http://www.cs.ruu.nl/cgi-bin/faqwais/
                http://www.lib.ox.ac.uk/internet/news/faq/by_group.index.html
    Asia	ftp://nctuccca.edu.tw/USENET/FAQ/
                ftp://hwarang.postech.ac.kr/pub/usenet/news.answers/
                ftp://ftp.hk.super.net/mirror/faqs/
    Australia	ftp://ftp.info.au/usenet/FAQs/



    Additional information on how to get access
to various Internet resources by email can be
found in Bob Rankin's Internet-by-Email FAQ,
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/internet-services/access-via-email.

    To get the latest edition of this document sent to you by return
email, send a message to one of these addresses:

        To: mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu (for US, Canada & South America)
        Enter only this line in the BODY of the note:
            send usenet/news.answers/internet-services/access-via-email

        To: mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk (for Europe, Asia, etc.)
        Enter only this line in the BODY of the note:
            send lis-iis e-access-inet.txt

------------------------------

Date:November 24, 1996
Subject: Q2.4 -- How do I access comp.mail.sendmail by email?

    Send email to mxt@dl.ac.uk with the command "sub
comp-news.comp.mail.sendmail full-US-ordered-email-address" as
the body of the message (with your correct address in place of the
"full-US-ordered-email-address", and omitting the double quotes in
all cases of this example).

    E-mail you want posted on comp.mail.sendmail should be sent to
comp-mail-sendmail@dl.ac.uk

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q2.5 -- Where can I ask email-related DNS questions?

    Depending on how deeply they get into the DNS, they can be asked
here.  However, you'll probably be told that you should send them to
the Usenet newsgroup comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains (DNS in
general) or to the Info-BIND mailing list (if the question is specific
to that program).

------------------------------

Date:May 23, 1996
Subject: Q2.6 -- How can I subscribe to these?

    For comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains, you have to be on
Usenet.  They don't have a news-to-mail gateway yet (I'm working on
this), but they do have a FAQ, and it can be found at
ftp://ftp.njit.edu/pub/dns/Comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains.FAQ.

    Questions from all levels of experience can be found on this
newsgroup (as well as people to answer them), so don't be shy about
asking a question you think may be too simple.


    For the Info-BIND mailing list, send email to
bind-request@vix.com with and empty subject (it gets ignored) and
the command "subscribe" as the body of the message.  Submissions
should be sent to bind@vix.com.

    Note that this list is now moderated, and anything you post to it
may get material added, deleted, or changed by the moderator.  He
reserves the right to reject any postings (and possibly unsubscribe
the poster), if he deems them inappropriate.

------------------------------

Date:May 23, 1996
Subject: Q2.7 -- Which version of sendmail should I run?

    If you're concerned at all about the security of your machines,
you should make sure you're at least running a recent release of
version 8 sendmail (either from your vendor or the public version
detailed in 1.8).

    Check the CERT Alerts and Summaries (details in 1.13) to make sure
that you're running a version that is free of known security holes.
Just because the sendmail program provided by your vendor isn't list
doesn't mean that you're not vulnerable, however.  If your particular
vendor or version isn't listed, check with your vendor and on the
appropriate Internet mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups to verify.

    If nothing else, the most recent public version is usually a
pretty good bet, although you should check comp.mail.sendmail
to see if anyone has posted recent comments that haven't yet been
folded into a new release.


    That said, you need to look at what the primary function is for
the machine.  If its primary function is to run some CAD/CAM package
on the desk of an Engineer, then there's probably not much sense in
replacing the vendor-supplied version of sendmail (assuming it's
secure, according to the CERT Alerts and Summaries).  Just set the
machine up to forward all outbound mail to a central mail relay, and
then worry about making that central mail relay the best it can be.
Also arrange to have all their inbound mail pass through a central
Mail eXchanger (probably the same machine as the central Mail Relay),
for the same reasons.


    If the primary function for a machine is to act as that central
Mail Relay/Mail eXchanger, then I *strongly* recommend the best
version of sendmail you can get, and in my opinion that is the latest
release of version 8.  IDA sendmail is also pretty good, but virtually
everything it does, version 8 does better, and version 8 has the
additional advantage of having continued development as well.  On a
central mailhub, recent versions of IDA sendmail are the oldest
sendmail that I'd even consider leaving in place instead of replacing
with version 8.

    However, keep in mind that version 8 still hasn't been ported (so
far as we know) to some of the older (and perhaps more esoteric)
platforms, and if you're stuck using one of them, you may not have
much choice.


    Recently, some vendors have started shipping (or announced that
they will soon ship) version 8 sendmail pre-configured for their
machines.  Unfortunately, in most cases this means you get a
pre-compiled binary and a sendmail.cf file (that may need a bit of
tweaking), but not much else of the "standard" version 8 sendmail
installation kit.  Silicon Graphics (SGI) is known to already be
shipping version 8 sendmail in this fashion, and both Hewlett-Packard
and Sun Microsystems have announced that they soon will be (Sun has a
patch today that can be applied to upgrade many machines to an older
release of version 8 sendmail).

    This may be suitable for desktop machines forwarding all their
mail to a central Mail Relay and receiving all their mail from a
central Mail eXchanger, but I personally believe that this is not
likely to be suitable for the central Mail Relay/Mail eXchanger
itself.  In that case, I recommend you get and install the latest
version and get the m4 macros, the on-line documentation, the source
code, etc....

------------------------------

Date:January 21, 1997
Subject: Q2.8 -- What is the latest release of sendmail?

    For version 8 sendmail, there are three release trees.

    For those people who, for whatever reason, are unable or
unwilling to upgrade to version 8.8.z, releases of version 8.6 and
8.7 sendmail are still available.  As of this writing, the most
recent release of version 8.6 sendmail is 8.6.13, and the most
recent release of version 8.7 sendmail is 8.7.6.

    For the most recent releases of 8.6 and 8.7 sendmail, there is a
version number difference between the sendmail program itself and the
associated configuration files.  This is okay.  The security-related
bug fixes that were made only required changes to the sendmail
program itself and not the configuration files, so only the version
number of the sendmail program itself was incremented.


    The most recent release of version 8.8 sendmail is 8.8.5.

    On machines exposed directly to the Internet, you should either
already be running 8.8.5 sendmail or plan on upgrading to it in the
immediate future.  This release is considered "mature", has security
fixes included that will not be found in any previous release, and
therefore supercedes all previous releases.

    There is no further support for previous releases of sendmail.

------------------------------

Date:January 21, 1997
Subject: Q2.9 -- Where can I find it?

    By anonymous FTP from ftp.sendmail.org in /pub/sendmail, or (in
URL form) via ftp://ftp.sendmail.org/pub/sendmail/.  If you care,
there should be files in this directory that end with the extension
".sig" which you can check with PGP to make sure that corresponding
archives haven't been modified.  You'll need to have the PGP key
of Eric Allman on your public keyring to be able to verify these
archives with their associated .sig files.

    Current releases of sendmail can also be found at
ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/ucb/src/sendmail/.

    There are no other known official version 8 sendmail mirrors.


    Check the sendmail home page at http://www.sendmail.org/ for
late-breaking updates and other useful information.

    If you want to be notified regarding future updates to sendmail
and other items of potential interest, you may want to subscribe
to the sendmail-announce mailing list.  Address your subscription
requests to "majordomo@lists.sendmail.org" with "subscribe
sendmail-announce" as the body of the message.

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q2.10 -- What are the differences between Version 8 and
        other versions?

    See doc/changes/changes.{me,ps} in the distribution.  See also
RELEASE_NOTES at the top level.

------------------------------

Date:March 24, 1997
Subject: Q2.11 -- What is BIND and where can I get the latest version?

    BIND stands for "Berkeley Internet Name Daemon", and is the
Internet de-facto standard program for turning host names into IP
addresses.

    The BIND Home Page is at http://www.isc.org/bind.html, which
provides pointers to the most recent release of BIND.  Note that
BIND 4.9.5-P1 is the most recent "production version", and BIND
8.1 (the next major release; skipping 5.x-7.x) is a "release
candidate" as of version 8.1T3B.  See the BIND 8.1T3B announcement
at ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/bind/src/testing/t3b-ann.asc for more
information.


    Note that there are bugs in older resolver libraries, which can
cause problems getting to large sites (that list more than five IP
addresses for a particular name), or represent a huge security hole
as they do not check the returned data to see if it will fit in the
amount of space pre-allocated for it.

    If at all possible, you should get the most recent "release"
version of BIND and make a serious attempt to integrate it into
your configuration, since virtually all vendor-provided resolver
libaries are woefully out of date.

------------------------------

Date:March 24, 1997
Subject: Q2.12 -- What's the best platform for running sendmail?

    Generally speaking, I adhere to the old axiom that you should
choose what software you want to run first, then choose the platform
(hardware and OS) that best runs this software.  By this token, if
sendmail is the software, then a recent version of BSD Unix would
probably be best, since sendmail was developed at UC Berkeley on
BSD Unix.  FreeBSD and BSD/OS are two known implementations of
BSD Unix for Intel-based PC's (among other hardware platforms),
and this would make them the most "native" OSes for sendmail.
FreeBSD is freely available by anonymous ftp or on CD-ROM, and
BSD/OS is a commercial product.

    However, not everyone has this kind of "luxury".  If you're on a
homogenous network (i.e., completely composed of only one type of
hardware and OS), then you should probably be running the same OS as
the rest of the machines on the network, regardless of the axiom
stated above.  You may have other problems, but you should at least be
able to get some local support on the OS for your machine.


    Either way, if the primary function of the machine is to handle
"large" quantities of mail (for whatever value you define "large"
to be), I strongly recommend getting the latest stable release of
version 8 sendmail.

    On the other hand, if the primary function of the machine is
to sit on some Engineer's desk and do CAD, then it may be easier
for you to leave the vendor-supplied version of sendmail on that
machine (after suitable configuration), and instead concentrate
your efforts on making the central mail handling machine(s) as
robust and capable as they can be.

    However, you may be surprised to find that it is easier
for you to support only one version of sendmail across all the
various platforms than it is to try and support multiple versions of
sendmail, each unique for their particular platform.  In that case,
the easy solution is to put version 8 sendmail everywhere, and not
have to worry about vendor-specific problems with older versions.


    For more information on BSD Unix in general, see the Usenet
newsgroups under comp.unix.bsd, comp.bugs.4bsd,
comp.os.386bsd.  For more information on BSD/OS, see the BSD
newsgroups mentioned above, or the BSD/OS Home Page at
http://www.bsdi.com/.  For more information on FreeBSD, see the
Usenet newsgroups under comp.unix.bsd.freebsd, or the FreeBSD
Home Page at http://www.freebsd.org/.

------------------------------

Date:July 9, 1996
Subject: Q2.13 -- What is smrsh and where can I get it?

    From ftp://info.cert.org/pub/tools/smrsh/README:

        smrsh is a restricted shell utility that provides the ability
        to specify, through a configuration, an explicit list of
        executable programs.  When used in conjunction with sendmail,
        smrsh effectively limits sendmail's scope of program execution
        to only those programs specified in smrsh's configuration.

        smrsh has been written with portability in mind, and uses
        traditional Unix library utilities.  As such, smrsh should
        compile on most Unix C compilers.

The purpose for restricting the list of programs that can be executed
in this manner is to keep mail messages (either through an alias or
the .forward file in a user's home directory) from being sent to
arbitrary programs which are not necessarily known to be sufficiently
paranoid in checking their input, and can therefore be easily
subverted (this is related to, but different from, the /etc/shells
feature discussed in Q3.11).

    More information regarding the CERT-CC can be found at their web
site, http://www.cert.org.  For more information on CERT Alerts and
CERT Summaries, see ftp://info.cert.org/pub/cert_advisories/ and
ftp://info.cert.org/pub/cert_summaries/, respectively.


    You can find smrsh in the most recent sendmail source archive, as
well as ftp://info.cert.org/pub/tools/smrsh/.  Other very useful
programs can be found in ftp://info.cert.org/pub/tools/.

------------------------------

Date:July 5, 1996
Subject: Q2.14 -- What is smap and where can I get it?

    Smap (and smapd) are tools out of the Trusted Information Systems
(TIS) Firewall Toolkit (fwtk).  They were originally written by
firewall expert Marcus Ranum under contract to TIS, and TIS is
continuing what maintenance there is.  The toolkit may be found at
ftp://ftp.tis.com/pub/firewalls/toolkit/.  Support questions
regarding the toolkit may be sent to <mailto:fwall-support@tis.com>,
while you may join their mailing list <mailto:fwall-users@tis.com> by
sending electronic mail to <mailto:fwall-users-request@tis.com>.


    The concept of smap and smapd is that sendmail is a huge,
monolithic setuid root program that is virtually impossible to verify
as being "correct" and free from bugs (historically, sendmail has been
rather buggy and an easy mark for system crackers to exploit, although
with the advent of version 8 sendmail, this becomes much more
difficult).  In contrast, smap and smapd are very small (only a few
hundred lines long), and relatively easy to verify as being correct
and functioning as designed (however, as you will see later, we can
question their design).  According to the theory, it is therefore
safer and "better" to run smap and smapd as "wrappers" around
sendmail, which would no longer need to be run setuid root.

    Unfortunately, smap and smapd have a few problems of their
own, and don't appear to have been updated since late March 1996.
There have been conflicting reports of incompatibilities between
smapd and sendmail 8.7.y (both cannot be run on the same machine,
although if you're running sendmail 8.6.x and smap/smapd on the
local machine, people on the outside can still use sendmail 8.7.y
to talk to you).

    For further information on smap and smapd, see the documentation
that comes with the TIS Firewall Toolkit.


    For more information on firewalls, see the Firewalls FAQ at
http://www.v-one.com/newpages/faq.htm.

------------------------------

Date:January 21, 1996
Subject: Q2.15 -- What is TCP-Wrappers and where can I get it?

    TCP-Wrappers is another security enhancement package.  The theory
is that you take programs being run under inetd (see /etc/inetd.conf)
and before you run the program to do the real work (ftpd, telnetd,
etc...), you first run the connection attempt through a package that
checks to see if the IP address of the source packet is coming from a
host known to be either good or bad (you may filter connection
attempts by source host name, domain name, raw IP address, port they
are attempting to connect to; and either allow known good connections
through thus refusing unknown connections, or accept all connections
except those known to be bad).

    The practice of TCP-Wrappers actually follows the theory
quite well.  It is a very useful and important tool in the System
Administrator's Bag of Things To Help You Secure Your Machine
>From Crackers, Spammers, Junkmailers, and Other Undesirables.
However, it only works for programs that communicate via TCP packets
(not UDP, such as NFS) started up out of inetd.  It does not work
for RPC-based services, and programs that start up a daemon outside
of inetd and just leave it running obviously don't benefit beyond
the initial connection that gets the daemon started (however, see
the FTP URL below for other packages that can help secure RPC and
portmapper-based services).

    However, most sendmail installations tend to start up a daemon and
leave it running at all times.  If you did run sendmail out of inetd,
you'd lose the benefit of the load average checking code that is
executed only in daemon mode, and for systems that handle a lot of
mail, this is vitally important.

    You can get TCP-Wrappers from
ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/security/, a site that has
a whole host of other useful security tools, such as
securelib, portmap, satan, cops, crack, etc...  You can
also find pointers to many other useful security tools at
http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/SecurityTools.html, and the COAST Archive
at http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/spaf/hotlists/csec.html is a
veritable cornucopia of all things security related.  The SANS 1996
Network Security Roadmap at http://www.sans.org/roadmap.html has
much useful information and pointers to many other useful resources.


    For the adventurous, you can get a source patch for version
8 sendmail (created for 8.7.6, but with work, applicable to older
releases) that will take the core TCP-Wrappers code and integrate
it into the daemon, so that you get the best of both worlds.
However, this isn't as smoothly integrated as it should be, is not
for the faint-of-heart, and is certainly not officially supported
by the orginal author of sendmail (Eric Allman).  This functionality
is integrated in a different fashion into version 8.8.5 sendmail.

    You should be able to find the unsupported patch at
ftp://ftp.win.tue.nl/pub/security/sendmail-tcpd.patch.

------------------------------

Date:November 24, 1996

Subject: Q2.16 -- Why won't db 1.85 build for my SGI running Irix
        >= 5.2?

    The db 1.85 package as available from ftp.cs.berkeley.edu
provides Irix support up to Irix 4.05F, but 5.{2,3} need a slightly
patched version.  Some vendors also provide db standard with their OS
(DEC Unix 4.0, for example).

    A tarball incorporating these changes is available at
ftp://ftp.his.com/pub/brad/sendmail/irix5.tar.gz.  This will
extract into ./db.1.85/PORT/irix.5.2, with a symbolic link
created from ./db.1.85/PORT/irix.5.3 to this same directory.
Make sure you extract this archive into the same directory
where you extracted the db 1.85 archive as available from
ftp.cs.berkeley.edu.  (see Q3.5 for more information on getting
the db 1.85 package).  An ASCII context diff of this same patch is
at ftp://ftp.his.com/pub/brad/sendmail/irix4-5.diff.

    A version of db 1.85 that has been supposedly patched
to compile under Irix 6.2 has been made available at
http://reality.sgi.com/ariel/db-1.85-irix.tar.Z, but I haven't
had a chance to download and check it out yet.

------------------------------

Date:August 30, 1996

Subject: Q2.17 -- What is makemap and where can I get it?

    The program "makemap" is used to build the databases used by
version 8 sendmail, for things like the UserDB, mailertables,
etc....

    It is distributed as part of the basic Operating System from
some vendors, but source code for it is also included at the root
level of the sendmail archive (at least, it is for sendmail 8.6.12
and 8.7.5, and presumably will continue to be as newer releases come
out).  However, it is not considered a "supported" part of version
8 sendmail.  Just like the other source provided in the archive,
the Makefile will likely need some tweaking for your specific site.

    It turns out that Irix 5.3 doesn't appear to have the dbm or
ndbm libraries, but to compile makemap.c, you need to have -DNDBM
on the "DBMDEF=" line (some necessary things are defined only
in /usr/include/ndbm.h).  Try just leaving off "-lndbm" from the
"LIBS=" line in the Makefile for makemap.

    If you plan on using makemap with db 1.85 on an SGI machine
running a version of Irix later than 4.x, see Q2.16 for some
additional steps to get db 1.85 compiled on your machine.

------------------------------

Date:May 28, 1996
Subject: Q3.1 -- How do I make all my addresses appear to be from a
        single host?

    Using the m4 macros, use:

        MASQUERADE_AS(my.dom.ain)

    This will cause all addresses to be sent out as being from the
indicated domain.

    On your mailhub/mailhost/Domain Mail eXchanger, you may need to
add "my.dom.ain" to the sendmail.cw file or the "Cwhost.my.dom.ain"
line in the sendmail.cf file.

    If you're using version 8.7 sendmail, and you want to hide this
information in the envelope as well as the headers, use:

        FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)

------------------------------

Date:January 24, 1996
Subject: Q3.2 -- How do I rewrite my From: lines to read
        ``First_Last@My.Domain''?

    There are a couple of ways of doing this.  This describes using
the "user database" code.  This is still experimental, and was
intended for a different purpose -- however, it does work with a bit
of care.  It does require that you have the Berkeley "db" package
installed (it won't work with DBM).

    First, create your input file.  This should have lines like:

        loginname:mailname	First_Last
        First_Last:maildrop	loginname

    If your login name is "john" and your full name is "John Q.
Public", then this would be:

        john:mailname		John_Q_Public@your.domain.goes.here
        John_Q_Public:maildrop	john

    The words "mailname" and "maildrop" must be typed in literally,
just as they appear.


    Install this file in (say) /etc/userdb.  Create the database:

        makemap -d btree /etc/userdb.db < /etc/userdb

    You can then create a config file that uses this.  You will have
to include the following in your .mc file:

        define(confUSERDB_SPEC, /etc/userdb.db)
        FEATURE(notsticky)

    Version 8.7 sendmail changes the semantics of this feature such
that notsticky is turned on by default, and if you want the old (8.6)
behaviour, you instead define:

        FEATURE(stickyhost)


    You also need to make sure that you have the "ik" flags specified
on the affected mailer definition.


    Note: The program "makemap" is discussed in further detail
in Q2.17.  The UserDB feature is discussed further on pp. 643-645
of _sendmail, 2nd Ed._ by Costales.

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q3.3 -- So what was the user database feature intended for?

    The intent was to have all information for a given user (where the
user is the unique login name, not an inherently non-unique full name)
in one place.  This would include phone numbers, addresses, and so
forth.  The "maildrop" feature is because Berkeley does not use a
centralized mail server (there are a number of reasons for this that
are mostly historic), and so we need to know where each user gets his
or her mail delivered -- i.e., the mail drop.

    UC Berkeley is (was) in the process of setting up their
environment so that mail sent to an unqualified "name" goes to that
person's preferred maildrop; mail sent to "name@host" goes to that
host.  The purpose of "FEATURE(notsticky)" is to cause "name@host" to
be looked up in the user database for delivery to the maildrop.

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q3.4 -- Why are you so hostile to using full names for email
        addresses?

    Because full names are not unique.  For example, the computer
community has two Andy Tannenbaums and two Peter Deutsches.  At one
time, Bell Labs had two Stephen R. Bournes with offices a few doors
apart.  You can create alternative addresses (e.g.,
Stephen_R_Bourne_2), but that's even worse -- which one of them has to
have their name desecrated in this way?  And you can bet that one of
them will get most of the other person's email.

    So called "full names" are just an attempt to create longer
versions of unique names.  Rather that lulling people into a sense of
security, I'd rather that it be clear that these handles are
arbitrary.  People should use good user agents that have alias
mappings so that they can attach arbitrary names for their personal
use to those with whom they correspond (such as the MH alias file).

    Even worse is fuzzy matching in email -- this can make good
addresses turn bad.  For example, Eric Allman is currently (to the
best of our knowledge) the only ``Allman'' at Berkeley, so mail sent
to Allman@Berkeley.EDU should get to him.  But if another Allman
ever appears, this address could suddenly become ambiguous.  He's been
the only Allman at Berkeley for over fifteen years -- to suddenly have
this "good address" bounce mail because it is ambiguous would be a
heinous wrong.

    Directory services should be as fuzzy as possible (within reason,
of course).  Mail services should be unique.

------------------------------

Date:November 24, 1996
Subject: Q3.5 -- Where do I find this user database (UserDB) code?

    The user database code is part of the Sendmail V8 distribution.
However, it depends on your installing the db library from the
package at ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/db.1.85.tar.gz.
If you install this library, edit the Makefile to include the
right option (-DNEWDB), and then make sendmail again, you get a
binary which has the database features described in the book and
the documentation provided in the sendmail source archive.

    If you're using SGI Irix above 4.x, see Q2.16 for the patches
you will need to get db 1.85 working on your machine.

------------------------------

Date:July 19, 1996
Subject: Q3.6 -- How do I get the user database to work with Pine or
        with FEATURE(always_add_domain)?

    The basic incompatibility with Pine and the user database option
is in how Pine writes From addresses in the header.  Most MUAs write
the From address as "From: user", while Pine, for reasons given in
its documentation, write the From address as "From: user@FQDN"
(FQDN=fully qualified domain name).  Using the m4 feature macro
"always_add_domain" has the same effect.  Because of this difference,
the user database does not rewrite these headers.

    One solution to this problem is to make the following change in
the sendmail.mc file compiled by m4 into your /etc/sendmail.cf (or
wherever your sendmail.cf file is located) after you have the user
database option installed and working with other MUAs:

    Early in the section(s) where you are setting configuration
variables, add the following:

        # Define our userdb file for FQDN rewrites
        Kuserdb btree -o /etc/userdb.db

    And a bit later, before the "MAILER()" entries, but after other
configuration options have been set:

        LOCAL_RULE_1
        ########################################################
        ### Local Ruleset 1, rewrite sender header & envelope ##
        ########################################################
        #Thanks to Bjart Kvarme <bjart.kvarme@usit.uio.no>
        S1
        R$-			$1 < @ $j . >			user => user@localhost
        R$- < @ $=w . > $*	$: $1 < @ $2 . > $3 ?? $1	user@localhost ?
        R$+ ?? $+		$: $1 ?? $(userdb $2 : mailname $: @ $)
        R$+ ?? @		$@ $1				Not found
        R$+ ?? $+		$>3 $2				Found, rewrite
            
        #NOTE    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
        #	  Use Tab Characters  Use Tab Characters in these regions
        # to make three columns (the line with "mailname" only has 2 columns).

    Now the user database should re-write messages sent with Pine or
anything else that causes local users to have their address be fully
qualified (both header and envelope sender will be properly
re-written).  If this still does not work for you, try adding the
following to either the system-wide pine.conf, pine.conf.fixed, or
your personal .pinerc:

        user-domain=localhost

    This has been known to help solve the problem for some people.

    However, a more elegant (read: m4-based) solution for version 8
sendmail users has yet to be created.

------------------------------

Date:March 24, 1997
Subject: Q3.7 -- How do I manage several (virtual) domains?

    If you want to provide mailservice to several domains and be able
to add identical names across different domains, as in this example:

           user@a.dom.ain	mb1@dom.ain
           user@b.dom.ain	mb2@dom.ain
           user@c.dom.ain	mb@outer.space

    you may accomplish this by using an external database in
conjunction with minor Ruleset rewriting in sendmail.cf.  Many ISPs
(Internet Service Providers) have asked me and here's a general
solution (you may combine it with userdb's if you need to):

    1.  Make a textfile (I usually make one for each domain and
        concatenate them before database-compilation) with the
        following structure:

            user@a.dom.ain	mb1@dom.ain
            user@b.dom.ain	mb2@dom.ain
            user@c.dom.ain	mb@outer.space

        The LHS (Left Hand Side) is the mail-adress of a particular
        user and the RHS is the corresponding mailbox.  An example
        that might apply to the real world:

            webmaster@josnet.se		wm.list@eowyn.josnet.se
            webmaster@client1.se	joe@client1.se
            webmaster@client2.se	anne@another.provider.se
            webmaster@client3.se	joe@client3.se
            joe@client1.se		c1_joe@mail.josnet.se
            joe@client3.se		joeuser

        Note that you have to spell out the complete email-address in
        the LHS entry.  The RHS entry may be either a local address
        (for example 'johan' if that account exists) or a complete
        email-adress on another system (or a domain that the server
        recognizes as local for that matter).

    2.  Compile the textfile into a database:

            makemap hash mbt.db <mbt

        You may you use other lookup-methods than hash (btree for
        example).  The resulting database is mbt.db in this example
        and the input is the textfile mbt.

    3.  Add a few lines in sendmail.cf:

        A.  In the beginning (typically in the "local info" section or
            together with the user database option in the "options"
            section):

            # Declare mbt as a hash-lookup database:
            Kmbt hash /etc/mail/mbt.db

       B.  In the Ruleset 98 (local part of ruleset 0) section, add:

            # Use mailboxtable-database:
            R$+ < @ $+ . >	$: $1 < @ $2 > .
            R$+ < @ $+ > $*	$: $(mbt $1@$2 $: $1 < @ $2 > $3 $)
            R$+ < @ $+ > $*	$: $(mbt $2 $: $1 < @ $2 > $3 $)
            RERROR $*		$#error $: $1
            R$+ < @ $+ > .	$: $1 < @ $2 . >

            If you have any other rewrite rules in ruleset 98, these
            should be able to either go after or before the existing
            rules, but you may have to do some experimenting to
            find out which placement works best.

    4.  The next-to-last line of these rules let you have an alias
        file like:

            joe@somedom.com	joe
            jim@somedom.com	jim@othersite
            somedom.com		ERROR "No such user"

        And still have mail addressed to unknown users at that domain
        bounce properly.  You can also do a form of redirects, such
        as:

            fred@somedom.com	ERROR "This user has moved to fred@otherdom.com"

    5.  Test with sendmail -bv and/or sendmail -bt

    6.	Restart sendmail.  You must do this in order to have the
        daemon reread the sendmail.cf.


    Note: Alternate sets of instructions and/or kits
can be found at http://www.westnet.com/providers,
http://hub.org/softdocs/Sendmail-VD,
ftp://samson.oslo.uninett.no/pub/unix/sendmail/, and
http://jos.net/projects/mbt/.  None of these have been tested
by the maintainer of this FAQ, but are believed to work correctly.
Which you use is a matter of your personal aesthetics.


    If you're using version 8.8 sendmail, you can make use of the
new "virtual user table" feature (for one thing, it won't require
that you add new rewrite rules to your sendmail configuration, as
the previous example does).

        1.  Put "FEATURE(virtusertable)" in your sendmail.mc
            file.

        2.  By default, sendmail will build tables out of
            /etc/virtusertable.  If you want to change this, put
            something like:

                define(`VIRTUSER_TABLE', `-o hash /usr/local/lib/virtusertable')dnl

            in your sendmail.mc file.

        3.  Construct the virtusertable file like so:

                info@foo.com	foo-info
                info@bar.com	bar-info
                @baz.org	jane@elsewhere.net
                @somedom.com	error : 5.5.0 User unknown

            (Contrast with steps 1 and 4 in the previous example
            using regular mailertables).

        4.  Compile the textfile into a database:

                makemap hash /etc/virtusertable.db </etc/virtusertable

            You may you use other lookup-methods than hash (btree
            for example).  Make sure that this database type matches
            what is defined for the table in step 2.

        5.  Put all the domains listed on the LHS of these aliases
            in your sendmail.cw file, or on the Cw line in your
            sendmail.cf.

        6.  Recompile your sendmail.cf from your sendmail.mc and
            test it.

        7.  Once you are satisfied, move it into place and restart
            sendmail.


    Note that the virtusertable is only referenced for inbound
mail (more accurately, only for controlling delivery).  If you
want to rewrite mail addresses from your virtual domain users as
they pass through your system, you'll also need to make comparable
modifications to the genericstable (used for rewriting).

------------------------------

Date:July 9, 1996
Subject: Q3.8 -- There are four UUCP mailers listed in the
        configuration files.  Which one should I use?

    The choice is partly a matter of local preferences and what is
running at the other end of your UUCP connection.  Unlike good
protocols that define what will go over the wire, UUCP uses the policy
that you should do what is right for the other end; if they change,
you have to change.  This makes it hard to do the right thing, and
discourages people from updating their software.  In general, if you
can avoid UUCP, please do.

    If you can't avoid it, you'll have to find the version that is
closest to what the other end accepts.  Following is a summary of the
UUCP mailers available.

    uucp-old (obsolete name: "uucp")
      This is the oldest, the worst (but the closest to UUCP) way of
      sending messages across UUCP connections.  It does bangify
      everything and prepends $U (your UUCP name) to the sender's
      address (which can already be a bang path itself).  It can only
      send to one address at a time, so it spends a lot of time
      copying duplicates of messages.  Avoid this if at all possible.

    uucp-new (obsolete name: "suucp")
      The same as above, except that it assumes that in one rmail
      command you can specify several recipients.  It still has a lot
      of other problems.

    uucp-dom
      This UUCP mailer keeps everything as domain addresses.
      Basically, it uses the SMTP mailer rewriting rules.

      Unfortunately, a lot of UUCP mailer transport agents require
      bangified addresses in the envelope, although you can use
      domain-based addresses in the message header.  (The envelope
      shows up as the From_ line on UNIX mail.)  So....

    uucp-uudom
      This is a cross between uucp-new (for the envelope addresses)
      and uucp-dom (for the header addresses).  It bangifies the
      envelope sender (From_ line in messages) without adding the
      local hostname, unless there is no host name on the address at
      all (e.g., "wolf") or the host component is a UUCP host name
      instead of a domain name ("somehost!wolf" instead of
      "some.dom.ain!wolf").

    Examples:

    We are on host grasp.insa-lyon.fr (UUCP host name "grasp").  The
    following summarizes the sender rewriting for various mailers:

        Mailer	  sender		rewriting in the envelope
        ------		------		-------------------------
        uucp-{old,new}	wolf		grasp!wolf
        uucp-dom	wolf		wolf@grasp.insa-lyon.fr
        uucp-uudom	wolf		grasp.insa-lyon.fr!wolf

        uucp-{old,new}	wolf@fr.net	grasp!fr.net!wolf
        uucp-dom	wolf@fr.net	wolf@fr.net
        uucp-uudom	wolf@fr.net	fr.net!wolf

        uucp-{old,new}	somehost!wolf	grasp!somehost!wolf
        uucp-dom	somehost!wolf	somehost!wolf@grasp.insa-lyon.fr
        uucp-uudom	somehost!wolf	grasp.insa-lyon.fr!somehost!wolf


    If your only contact with the external world is through UUCP,
you'll probably want to recompile sendmail with support for DNS turned
off (if your host architecture supports a service switch file that
sendmail understands, it will use the service switch however you've
got it configured, even if you've compiled sendmail with DNS support
turned off, so make sure the service switch file is also properly
configured).

    Using "FEATURE(nodns)" probably won't completely satisfy you, as
more recent releases of version 8 sendmail really, REALLY, want to
know what their canonical hostname is, and will go to great lengths to
figure this out from the DNS.  But if you don't have any nameservers,
this can obviously add significant amounts of time to process startup
as sendmail repeatedly tries (and fails) to find this information.  It
then becomes doubly important to have the proper Fully Qualified
Domain Name (FQDN) listed first in your /etc/hosts file or in the file
used to build your NIS/NIS+ table (or whatever you use).

    For more information on "FEATURE(nodns)", see the RELEASE_NOTES
file for sendmail versions 8.7.1 and later (search for "FQDN"), as
well as _sendmail_, page 741 (page reference correct as of first
edition, first printing).

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q3.9 -- How do I fix "undefined symbol inet_aton" and
        "undefined symbol _strerror" messages?

    You've probably replaced your resolver with the version from BIND
4.9.3.  You need to compile with -l44bsd in order to get the
additional routines.

------------------------------

Date:March 24, 1997
Subject: Q3.10 -- How do I solve "collect: I/O error on connection"
        errors?

    There is nothing wrong.  This is just a diagnosis of a condition
that had not been diagnosed before.  If you are getting a lot of these
from a single host, there is probably some incompatibility between 8.x
and that host.  If you get a lot of them in general, you may have
network problems that are causing connections to get reset.

    Note that if you are using PPP and the MTU on your end does
not match what your service provider has configured, you may see
these problems.  Discuss with your service provider what the MTU
should be set to, and correct if there is a mismatch.

------------------------------

Date:July 9, 1996
Subject: Q3.11 -- Why can't my users forward their mail to a program?

    I just upgraded to version 8 sendmail and now when my users try to
forward their mail to a program they get an "illegal shell" or "cannot
mail to programs" message and their mail is not delivered.  What's
wrong?

    In order for people to be able to run a program from their
.forward file, version 8 sendmail insists that their shell (that is,
the shell listed for that user in the passwd entry) be a "valid"
shell, meaning a shell listed in /etc/shells.  If /etc/shells does not
exist, a default list is used, typically consisting of /bin/sh and
/bin/csh.

    This is to support environments that may have NFS-shared
directories mounted on machines on which users do not have login
permission.  For example, many people make their file server
inaccessible for performance or security reasons; although users have
directories, their shell on the server is /usr/local/etc/nologin or
some such.  If you allowed them to run programs anyway you might as
well let them log in.

    If you are willing to let users run programs from their .forward
file even though they cannot telnet or rsh in (as might be reasonable
if you run smrsh to control the list of programs they can run) then
add the line:

        /SENDMAIL/ANY/SHELL/

to /etc/shells.  This must be typed exactly as indicated, in caps,
with the trailing slash.

NOTA BENE:  DO NOT list /usr/local/etc/nologin in /etc/shells -- this
will open up other security problems.


    IBM AIX does not use /etc/shells -- a list of allowable login
shells is contained, along with many other login parameters, in
/etc/security/login.cfg.  You can copy the information in the
"shells=" stanza into a /etc/shells on your system so sendmail will
have something to use.  Do NOT add "/usr/lib/uucp/uucico" or any other
non-login shell into /etc/shells.

    Also note that there are some weird things that AFS throws into
the mix, and these can keep a program from running or running
correctly out of .forward files or the system-wide aliases.


    See also "smrsh" in Q2.13.

------------------------------

Date:November 24, 1996
Subject: Q3.12 -- Why do connections to the SMTP port take such a
        long time?

    I just upgraded to version 8 sendmail and suddenly connections to
the SMTP port take a long time.  What is going wrong?

    It's probably something weird in your TCP implementation that
makes the IDENT code act oddly.  On most systems version 8 sendmail
tries to do a ``callback'' to the connecting host to get a validated
user name (see RFC 1413 for detail).  If the connecting host does not
support such a service it will normally fail quickly with "Connection
refused", but certain kinds of packet filters and certain TCP
implementations just time out.

    To test this (pre-8.7.y sendmail), set the IDENT timeout to zero
using:

        define(`confREAD_TIMEOUT',`Ident=0')dnl

in the .mc file used by m4 to generate your sendmail.cf file.
Alternatively, if you don't use m4, you can put ``OrIdent=0'' in the
configuration file (we recommend the m4 solution, since that makes
maintenance much easier for people who don't understand sendmail
re-write rules, or after you've been away from it for a while).
Either way, this will completely disable all use of the IDENT
protocol.

    For version 8.7.y sendmail (and above), you should instead use:

        define(`confTO_IDENT',`0s')dnl


    Another possible problem is that you have your name server and/or
resolver configured improperly.  Make sure that all "nameserver"
entries in /etc/resolv.conf point to functional servers.  If you are
running your own server, make certain that all the servers listed in
your root cache are up to date (this file is usually called something
like "/var/namedb/root.cache"; see your /etc/named.boot file to get
your value).  Either of these can cause long delays.

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q3.13 -- Why do I get "unknown mailer error 5 -- mail:
        options MUST PRECEDE recipients" errors?

    I just upgraded to version 8 sendmail and suddenly I get errors
such as ``unknown mailer error 5 -- mail:  options MUST PRECEDE
recipients.'' What is going wrong?

    You need OSTYPE(systype) in your .mc file, where "systype" is set
correctly for your hardware & OS combination -- otherwise the
configurations use a default that probably disagrees with your local
mail system.  See cf/README for details.

    If this is on a Sun workstation, you might also want to take a
look at the local mailer flags in the Sun-supplied sendmail.cf and
compare them to the local mailer flags generated for your version 8
sendmail.cf.  If they differ, you might try changing the V8 flags to
match the Sun flags.

------------------------------

Date:March 24, 1996
Subject: Q3.14 -- Why does version 8 sendmail panic my SunOS box?

    Sendmail 8.7.y panics SunOS 4.1.3_U1 (at least for 1<=y<=3)
and SunOS 4.1.3, and sendmail 8.6.x seems fine on both machines (at
least for 9<=x<=12).

    The problem is that a kernel patch is missing, specifically
100584-08 (4.1.3), 102010-03 (4.1.3_U1), or 102517 (4.1.4).
This should be available from your hardware vendor through your
support contract or their online support facilities (including
being available on the SunSolve CD).

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q3.15 -- Why does the "From " header gets mysteriously
        munged when I send to an alias?

    ``It's not a bug, it's a feature.'' This happens when you have a
"owner-list" alias and you send to "list".  V8 propagates the owner
information into the envelope sender field (which appears as the "From
" header on UNIX mail or as the Return-Path:  header) so that
downstream errors are properly returned to the mailing list owner
instead of to the sender.  In order to make this appear as sensible as
possible to end users, I recommend making the owner point to a
"request" address -- for example:

        list:		:include:/path/name/list.list
        owner-list:	list-request
        list-request:	eric

    This will make message sent to "list" come out as being "From
list-request" instead of "From eric".

------------------------------

Date:November 24, 1996
Subject: Q3.16 -- Why doesn't MASQUERADE_AS (or the user database)
        work for envelope addresses as well as header addresses?

    Believe it or not, this is intentional.  The interpretation of the
standards by the version 8 sendmail development group was that this
was an inappropriate rewriting, and that if the rewriting were
incorrect at least the envelope would contain a valid return address.


    If you're using version 8.7.y sendmail (or later), you can use

        FEATURE(masquerade_envelope)

    in your sendmail.mc file to change this behaviour.

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q3.17 -- How do I run version 8 sendmail and support the
        MAIL11V3 protocol?

    Get the reimplementation of the mail11 protocol by Keith Moore
from ftp://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/gwtools/ (with contributions
from Paul Vixie).

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q3.18 -- Why do messages disappear from my queue unsent?

    When I look in the queue directory I see that qf* files have been
renamed to Qf*, and sendmail doesn't see these.  What's wrong?

    If you look closely you should find that the Qf files are owned by
users other than root.  Since sendmail runs as root it refuses to
believe information in non-root-owned qf files, and it renames them to
Qf to get them out of the way and make it easy for you to find.  The
usual cause of this is twofold:  first, you have the queue directory
world writable (which is probably a mistake -- this opens up other
security problems) and someone is calling sendmail with an "unsafe"
flag, usually a -o flag that sets an option that could compromise
security.  When sendmail sees this it gives up setuid root
permissions.

    The usual solution is to not use the problematic flags.  If you
must use them, you have to write a special queue directory and have
them processed by the same uid that submitted the job in the first
place.

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q3.19 -- When is sendmail going to support RFC 1522 MIME
              header encoding?

    This is considered to be a MUA issue rather than an MTA issue.

Quoth Eric Allman:

        The primary reason is that the information necessary to
    do the encoding (that is, 8->7 bit) is unknown to the MTA.
    In specific, the character set used to encode names in headers
    is _NOT_ necessarily the same as used to encode the body
    (which is already encoded in MIME in the charset parameter
    of the Content-Type: header).  Furthermore, it is perfectly
    reasonable for, say, a Swede to be living and working in Korea,
    or a Russian living and working in Germany, and want their
    name to be encoded in their native character set; it could
    even be that the sender was Japanese, the recipient Russian,
    and the body encoded in ISO 8859-1.  If all I have are 8-bit
    characters, I can't choose the charset properly.

        Similarly, when doing 7->8 bit conversions, I don't want
    to throw away this information, as it is necessary for proper
    presentation to the end user.

------------------------------

Date:January 17, 1997
Subject: Q3.20 -- Why can't I get mail to some places, but
              instead always get the error "reply: read error from
              name.of.remote.host"?

    This is usually caused by a bug in the remote host's mail server,
or Mail Transport Agent (MTA).  The "EHLO" command of ESMTP causes
the remote server to drop the SMTP connection.  There are several
MTAs that have this problem, but one of the most common server
implementations can be identified by the "220 All set, fire away"
greeting it gives when you telnet to its SMTP port.

    To work around this problem, you can configure sendmail to use
a mailertable with an entry telling sendmail to use plain SMTP when
talking to that host:

        name.of.remote.host		smtp:name.of.remote.host


    Sites which must run a host with this broken SMTP implemetation
should do so by having a site running sendmail or some other
reliable (and reasonably modern) SMTP MTA act as an MX server for
the problem host.


    There is also a problem wherein some TCP/IP implementations
are broken, and if any connection attempt to a remote end gets a
"connection refused", then *all* connections to that site will
get closed.  Of course, if you try to use the IDENT protocol across
a firewall (at either end), this is highly likely to result in the
same apparent kind of "read error".

    The fix is simple -- on those machines with broken TCP/IP
implementations, do not attempt to use IDENT.  When compiling newer
releases of version 8 sendmail, the compiler should automatically
detect whether you're on a machine that is known to have this kind
of TCP/IP networking problem, and make sure that sendmail does
not attempt to use IDENT.  If you've since patched your machine so
that it no longer has this problem, you'll need to go back in and
explicitly configure sendmail for support of IDENT, if you want
that feature.

------------------------------

Date:January 17, 1996
Subject: Q3.21 -- Why doesn't "FEATURE(xxx)" work?

    When creating m4 Master Config (".mc") files for version 8
sendmail, many "FEATURE()" macros simply change the definition of
internal variables that are referenced in the "MAILER()" definitions.

    To make sure that everything works as desired, you need to
make sure that "OSTYPE()" macros are put at the very beginning
of the file, followed by "FEATURE()" and "HACK()" macros, local
definitions, and at the very bottom, the "MAILER()" definitions.

------------------------------

Date:March 24, 1997
Subject: Q3.22 -- How do I configure sendmail to not use DNS?

    In situations where you're behind a firewall, or across a
dial-up line, there are times when you need to make sure that
programs (such as sendmail) do not use the DNS at all.


    With version 8.8, you change the service switch file to omit
"DNS" and use only NIS, files, and other map types as appropriate.

    With previous releases of version 8 sendmail, you need to
recompile the binary and make sure that "NAMED_BIND" is turned off
in src/conf.h.


    Note that you'll need to forward all your outbound mail to
another machine as a "relay" (one that does use DNS, and understands
how to properly use MX records, etc...), otherwise you won't be able
to get mail to any site(s) other than the one(s) you configure in
your /etc/hosts file (or whatever).

------------------------------

Date:March 24, 1997
Subject: Q3.23 -- How do I get all my queued mail delivered to my
              Unix box from my ISP?

    Assuming you're running sendmail or some other SMTP MTA on
some sort of a Unix host, and your ISP uses version 8.8 sendmail
and they queue all mail for your domain (as opposed to stuffing it
all in one file that you need to download via POP3 or somesuch),
something like the following script should do the trick:

        #!/bin/sh
        telnet mail.myisp.com. 25 << __EOF__
        EHLO me.mydomain.com
        ETRN mydomain.com
        QUIT
        __EOF__


    Note that this is indented for readability, and the real script
would have column position #1 of the file be the first printable
character in each line.

    Of course, you'll have to fill in the appropriate details for
"mail.myisp.com", "mydomain.com", etc....


    If this script doesn't work, you may have problems with "here"
documents being fed as standard input to commands (like telnet).  In
that case, you'll need to build a similar script using "expect".  For
more information on expect, see http://expect.nist.gov and the book
"Exploring Expect: A Tcl-Based Toolkit for Automating Interactive
Applications" (http://www.ora.com/catalog/expect/noframes.html).


    If your ISP doesn't use version 8.8 sendmail, you may have to
cobble together alternative solutions.  They may have a "ppplogin"
script that is executed every time your machines dials them up, and
if so, you may be able to have them modified this script so as to
put a "sendmail -qRmydomain.com" in it (which is effectively what
the "ETRN" command does, but in a safer fashion).

    Alternatively, they may have a hacked finger daemon, so
that you'd put "finger mydomain.com@theirhost.theirdomain.com"
in your script.  Or, they may have some other solution for you.
However, only they would be able to answer what solutions they have
available to them.

    Obviously, the easiest and most "standard" solution is to have
them upgrade their system to the most recent stable release of
version 8.8 sendmail.

------------------------------

Date:July 9, 1996
Subject: Q4.1 -- Should I use a wildcard MX for my domain?

    If at all possible, no.

    Wildcard MX records have lots of semantic "gotcha"s.  For example,
they will match a host "unknown.your.domain" -- if you don't
explicitly test for unknown hosts in your domain, you will get "config
error: mail loops back to myself".

    See RFCs 1535, 1536, and 1912 (updates RFC 1537) for more detail
and other related (or common) problems.  See also _DNS and BIND_ by
Albitz and Liu.

    They can also cause your system to add your domain to outgoing
FQDNs in a desperate attempt to get the mail to where it's supposed to
go, but because *.your.domain is valid due to the wildcard MX,
delivery to not.real.domain.your.domain will get dumped on you, and
you may even find yourself in a loop as the domain keeps getting
tacked on time after time after time (the "config error: mail loops
back to myself" problem).


    Wildcard MX records are just a bad idea, plain and simple.
They don't work the way you'd expect, and virtually no one gets
them right.  Avoid them at all costs.

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q4.2 -- How can I set up an auto-responder?

    This is a local mailer issue, not a sendmail issue.  Depending on
what you're doing, look at procmail (see Q4.9), ftpmail, or Majordomo.


    The latest version of Majordomo can be found at
ftp://ftp.greatcircle.com/pub/majordomo/.  It is written in Perl and
requires either Perl 4.036, and appears to run with only minor tweaks
under 5.001a or later.  Make sure to check out the web interface for
Majordomo called "Mailserv" at http://iquest.com/~fitz/www/mailserv/
or "LWGate" at http://www.netspace.org/users/dwb/lwgate.html.  The
latest versions of Perl (both 4.x and 5.x) can be found in
http://www.metronet.com/perlinfo/src/.  More information about Perl
can be found at http://www.metronet.com/perlinfo/perl5.html

    The latest version of ftpmail can be found at
ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/ftpmail or any comp.sources.misc
archive (volume 37).

------------------------------

Date:July 9, 1996
Subject: Q4.3 -- How can I get sendmail to deliver local mail to
        $HOME/.mail instead of into /usr/spool/mail (or /usr/mail)?

    Again, this is a local mailer issue, not a sendmail issue.  Either
modify your local mailer (source code will be required) or change the
program called in the "local" mailer configuration description to be a
new program that does this local delivery.  One program that is
capable of doing this is procmail (see Q4.9), although there are
probably many others as well.

    You might be interested in reading the paper ``HLFSD:  Delivering
Email to your $HOME'' available in the Proceedings of the USENIX
System Administration (LISA VII) Conference (November 1993).  More
information is at ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/pub/hlfsd/README.hlfsd,
while the actual archive of the papers is at
ftp://ftp.cs.columbia.edu/pub/hlfsd/hlfsd-paper.tar.gz (tar archive,
gzip'ed).

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q4.4 -- Why does it deliver the mail interactively when I'm
        trying to get it to go into queue only mode?

    Or, I'm trying to use the "don't deliver to expensive mailer"
flag, and it delivers the mail interactively anyway.  I can see it
does it:  here's the output of "sendmail -v foo@somehost" (or Mail -v
or equivalent).


    The -v flag to sendmail (which is implied by the -v flag to Mail
and other programs in that family) tells sendmail to watch the
transaction.  Since you have explicitly asked to see what's going on,
it assumes that you do not want to to auto-queue, and turns that
feature off.  Remove the -v flag and use a "tail -f" of the log
instead to see what's going on.

    If you are trying to use the "don't deliver to expensive mailer"
flag (mailer flag "e"), be sure you also turn on global option "c" --
otherwise it ignores the mailer flag.

------------------------------

Date:January 17, 1997
Subject: Q4.5 -- How can I solve "config error: mail loops back to
        myself" messages?

    I'm getting these error messages:

        553 relay.domain.net config error: mail loops back to myself
        554 user@domain.net... Local configuration error

    How can I solve this problem?

    You have asked mail to the domain (e.g., domain.net) to be
forwarded to a specific host (in this case, relay.domain.net)
by using an MX record, but the relay machine doesn't recognize
itself as domain.net.  Add domain.net to /etc/sendmail.cw (if you
are using FEATURE(use_cw_file)) or add "Cw domain.net" to your
configuration file.


    IMPORTANT:  When making changes to your configuration file, be
sure you kill and restart the sendmail daemon (for ANY change in the
configuration, not just this one):

        kill `head -1 /etc/sendmail.pid`
        sh -c "`tail -1 /etc/sendmail.pid`"

    NOTA BENE:  kill -1 does not work with versions prior to 8.7.y!

    With version 8.8.z sendmail, if the daemon was started up with
a full pathname (i.e., "/usr/lib/sendmail -bd -q13m"), then you
should be able to send it a HUP signal ("kill -1", or more safely,
"kill -HUP") and have it reload itself (version 8.7.y sendmail
cannot do this safely, and represents a security risk if it's not
replaced with version 8.8.3 or later).

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q4.6 -- Why does my sendmail process sometimes hang when
        connecting over a SLIP/PPP link?

    I'm connected to the network via a SLIP/PPP link.  Sometimes my
sendmail process hangs (although it looks like part of the message has
been transfered).  Everything else works.  What's wrong?

    Most likely, the problem isn't sendmail at all, but the low level
network connection.  It's important that the MTU (Maximum Transfer
Unit) for the SLIP connection be set properly at both ends.  If they
disagree, large packets will be trashed and the connection will hang.

------------------------------

Date:November 24, 1996
Subject: Q4.7 -- How can I summarize the statistics generated by
        sendmail in the syslog?

    This question is addressed on page 319 of _sendmail_ by Bryan
Costales.

    An updated version of this syslog-stat.pl script (so that
it understands the log format used in version 8 sendmail) is
at ftp://ftp.his.com/pub/brad/sendmail/syslog_stats.  The
updated version of ssl has been uploaded to the SMTP Resources
Directory (in ftp://ftp.is.co.za/networking/mail/tools/),
as well as ftp://ftp.his.com/pub/brad/sendmail/ssl.
There is also another program (written by Bryan Beecher) at
ftp://ftp.his.com/pub/brad/sendmail/smtpstats.

    If you're interested in summarizing POP statistics, there is
ftp://ftp.his.com/pub/brad/sendmail/popstats, also written by
Bryan Beecher.


    To see what else is available today, check the Comprehensive Perl
Archive Network ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/CPAN or
ftp://ftp.cis.ufl.edu/pub/perl/CPAN/CPAN for the site nearest you.
For the scripts themselves, look under CPAN/scripts/mailstuff/ at
any CPAN site.  For more information, see the comp.lang.perl.*
FAQs at ftp://ftp.cis.ufl.edu:/pub/perl/faq/FAQ or
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/comp.lang.perl.*/.


    There is also the "Sendmail Statistics Project" which has a web
page at http://www.josnet.se/projects/ssp/.  Although they have
examples online of what the output might look like, it now appears
that this project is either dead or at least indefinitely on hold.
Still, you may be able to talk to the authors in order to get what
code from them you can.


    If you're interested in using these kinds of tools to help
you do some near real-time monitoring of your system, you might be
interested in MEWS (Mail Early Warning System).  From the README:

        If you've ever written a perl script to parse sendmail
        log files looking for errors, MEWS might be of interest to
        you. If you've ever thought about writing a perl script to
        munge sendmail log files, cringed a little and hurriedly
        came up with an excuse not to do it, read on.

        If you don't have a Solaris 2.5 machine, you can probably
        stop reading here.

        The Mail Early Warning System (MEWS) gives postmasters
        immediate notification of trouble spots on your mail
        backbone. It only works with sendmail.

        To explain it in a nutshell, whenever sendmail returns a
        4xx or 5xx SMTP code, with the MEWS modifications, it also
        sends the code over UDP to a daemon which then replays the
        error message to interested parties.  The man pages go into
        a little bit more detail.


    If this sounds like something you might be interested in
getting more details about, you can find the MEWS archive at
ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/pub/people/eamonn/mews.tar.Z.

------------------------------

Date:July 9, 1996
Subject: Q4.8 -- How can I check my sendmail.cf to ensure that it's
        re-writing addresses correctly?

    The recommended program for this is "checksendmail" by Rob
Kolstad.  Old versions of this are available on various archive sites,
but currently, the only way to get the most recent version (which has
been updated to understand version 8.7 long option name syntax, as
well as now supporting both Perl 4.x and Perl 5.x) is from Rob
himself.

    The latest archive will be made publicly available (most likely
through the SMTPRD run by Andras Salamon; see Q6.5, entry
sendmail-faq//online/index/14) as soon as it is received.

------------------------------

Date:July 9, 1996
Subject: Q4.9 -- What is procmail, and where can I get it?

    The program "procmail" is a replacement for the local mailer
(variously called /bin/mail, /usr/bin/mail, mail.local, rmail,
etc...).  It has been ported to run on virtually every OS you're
likely to run into, and has a whole host of features.  It is typically
about 30% faster performing the job of the local mailer than programs
such as /bin/mail or /usr/bin/mail, it has been hammered on widely to
make it extremely secure (much more so than most local mailers) and
very robust.  Procmail is also capable of helping you put a quota on a
user's mailbox through the standard Unix quota mechanism (see Q4.3).

    In short, whatever you've got, you're almost guaranteed that
procmail is better (if nothing else, the author has been able to focus
lots of time and energy into making it the best and fastest tool
available, while most system vendors just throw something together as
fast as they can and move on to the whole rest of the OS).

    However, this only begins to scratch the surface of what procmail
is capable of.  It's most important feature is the fact that it gives
you a standard way to create rules (procmail calls them "recipes") to
process your mail before the messages get put into your mailbox, and
for that feature alone, it is one of the most important tools any
administrator can have in their repertoire.  By filtering out or
automatically dealing with 80% of your daily cruft, it lets you spend
more time on the hard 20%.

    Note that recent releases of version 8 sendmail natively support
using procmail as an alternate local mailer (see
"FEATURE(local_procmail)" for version 8.7 and above).  They also
support procmail as an additional local mailer, if you're concerned
about flat-out replacing your current local mailer with procmail (see
"MAILER(procmail)" in version 8.7 and above).


    You can also install procmail as a user and run it out of your
.forward file, although this tends to be a bit slower and less
efficient.


    The latest version of procmail can be found at
ftp://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/packages/procmail/.


    Procmail is also the core to a mailing list management package
called "SmartList", so if you've already got procmail, adding
SmartList may be a good option.  Some listowners prefer Majordomo,
Listserv, or one of those other programs, but SmartList has more than
a few adherents as well.  Your personal tastes will dictate whether
you swear by SmartList or at it.

------------------------------

Date:March 24, 1997
Subject: Q4.10 -- How can I solve "cannot alias non-local names"
        errors?

    I upgraded from my vendor's sendmail to the latest version and
now I'm getting these error messages when I run "newaliases"

      /etc/aliases: line 13: MAILER-DAEMON... cannot alias non-local names
      /etc/aliases: line 14: postmaster... cannot alias non-local names

    How can I solve this problem?


    Your local mailer doesn't have the "A" flag specified.  Edit the
Mlocal line in sendmail.cf and add "A" to the flags listed after
"F=".

    Better yet, if you're running a recent version of sendmail
that uses m4 to generate .cf files from .mc files, regenerate your
sendmail.cf and see if that fixes the problem.  Remember to install
the new sendmail.cf and restart the sendmail daemon.

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q5.1.1 -- How can I solve "line 273: replacement $3 out of
        bounds" errors?

    When I use sendmail V8 with a Sun config file I get lines like:

        /etc/sendmail.cf: line 273: replacement $3 out of bounds

    the line in question reads:

        R$*<@$%y>$*		$1<@$2.LOCAL>$3			user@ether

    what does this mean?  How do I fix it?

    V8 doesn't recognize the Sun "$%y" syntax, so as far as it is
concerned, there is only a $1 and a $2 (but no $3) in this line.  Read
Rick McCarty's paper on "Converting Standard Sun Config Files to
Sendmail Version 8", in the contrib directory (file
"converting.sun.configs") in the latest version 8 sendmail
distribution for a full discussion of how to do this.

------------------------------

Date:March 23, 1996
Subject: Q5.1.2 -- How can I solve "line 445: bad ruleset 96 (50 max)"
        errors?

    When I use sendmail V8 on a Sun, I sometimes get lines like:

        /etc/sendmail.cf: line 445: bad ruleset 96 (50 max)

    what does this mean?  How do I fix it?

    You're somehow trying to start up the old Sun sendmail (or
sendmail.mx) with a version 8 sendmail config file, which Sun's
sendmail doesn't like.  Check your /etc/rc.local, any procedures that
have been created to stop and re-start the sendmail processes, etc....
Make sure that you've switched everything over to using the new
sendmail.  To keep this problem from ever happening again, try the
following (make sure you're logged in as root):

        mv /usr/lib/sendmail /usr/lib/sendmail.old
        ln -s /usr/local/lib/sendmail.v8 /usr/lib/sendmail
        mv /usr/lib/sendmail.mx /usr/lib/sendmail.mx.old
        ln -s /usr/local/lib/sendmail.v8 /usr/lib/sendmail.mx
        chmod 0000 /usr/lib/sendmail.old
        chmod 0000 /usr/lib/sendmail.mx.old

    Assuming, of course, that you have installed sendmail V8 in
/usr/local/lib/sendmail.v8.

------------------------------

Date:May 23, 1996
Subject: Q5.1.3 -- Why does version 8 sendmail (< 8.7.5) sometimes
            hang under Solaris 2.5?

    In moving from Solaris 2.4 to Solaris 2.5, the kernel changed its
name and is now in /kernel/genunix instead of /kernel/unix, so
_PATH_UNIX in conf.h is pointing to the wrong place.

    If you can't upgrade to the latest release of sendmail 8.8.z,
the next best thing to do is change _PATH_UNIX in conf.h (in the
solaris2 part) to point to the generic interface /dev/ksyms, like so:

        #   define _PATH_UNIX	   "/dev/ksyms"

------------------------------

Date:November 24, 1996
Subject: Q5.1.4 -- Why can't I use SunOS/Solaris to get email to
                    certain large sites?

    This is most likely a problem in your resolver libraries
(DNS, /etc/hosts, NIS, etc...).  Older Sun (and Solaris?) resolver
libraries allocated enough room for only five IP addresses for each
host name, and if any program ever ran across a name with more than
five IP addresses for it, the program would crash.

    For example, this would keep you from getting mail to CompuServe,
since (at the time of this writing) they list eleven IP addresses
for mx1.compuserve.com (one of the named MXes for compuserve.com).

    This will affect you even if you use version 8 sendmail, since
it's a problem in the resolver libraries, and not in sendmail itself.


    You should either get patches to the resolver libraries from
Sun, or the latest version of BIND (see Q2.12) and install their
resolver library routines.  Between the two, installing BIND is a
bit more work, but it typically gives you much more up-to-date code
to help you resist attacks to your systems, more capable programs
to be used for serving the DNS (including support for IPv6 and
several other features), and some very useful utility programs.

------------------------------

Date:July 5, 1996
Subject: Q5.2.1 -- The system resource controller always reports
        sendmail as "inoperative".  What's wrong?

    When I use version 8 sendmail on an IBM RS/6000 running AIX, the
system resource controller always reports sendmail as "inoperative",
even though it's actually running.  What's wrong?

    When running as a daemon, sendmail detaches from its parent
process, fooling the SRC into thinking that sendmail has exited.  To
fix this, issue the commands:

        kill `head -1 /etc/sendmail.pid`
        chssys -s sendmail -f 9 -n 15 -S -a "-d99.100"
        # use "-d0.1" in sendmail 8.6.x
        startsrc -s sendmail -a "-bd -q30m"
            # your sendmail args may vary

    Now the SRC should report the correct status of sendmail.  If you
are using version 8.6.x, use "-d0.1" instead of "-d99.100" (the debug
options changed somewhat in version 8.7).  In 8.6.x a side-effect of
the "-d0.1" option is that a few lines of debug output will be printed
on the system console every time sendmail starts up.

    For more information, read up on the System Resource Controller,
the lssrc command and the chssys command in the online AIX
documentation.

------------------------------

Date:May 23, 1996
Subject: Q5.2.2 -- Why can't I use AIX to get email to some sites?

    When I use IBM's sendmail on an IBM RS/6000 running AIX trying to
get to certain sites, it seems that I can get to some of them and not
others.  What's wrong?

    There are two possible problems here:

        1)  Your version of sendmail is not configured to recognize MX
            records in the DNS.  Search through your sendmail.cf
            looking for "OK MX" or "OK ALL".  Older configurations had
            this line commented out, and this will cause mail from you
            to some sites to fail (because those sites have MX
            records, but no A records in their DNS for the specific
            Fully Qualified Domain Name you're trying to mail to).

            For more information, see the comp.unix.aix FAQ
            ftp://rtfm.mit.edu:/pub/usenet/news.answers/aix-faq/.

        2)  There is a negative caching bug in AIX 3.2.5 with
            /usr/sbin/named executables that are less than 103000
            bytes long.  Ask your IBM representative to give you PMP
            3251, or the most recent patch that fixes this problem for
            your particular configuration and version of the OS.

------------------------------

Date:July 5, 1996
Subject: Q5.2.3 -- Why can't I get sendmail 8.7.1 to use MX records
        with AIX 3.2.5?

    IBM, in their infinite wisdom, provided a header file that would
easily mis-compile.  This resulted in the struct{} for the DNS query
to be mis-allocated, and MX processing would barf.

    Fix 1) upgrade to 8.7.5 - this has a code fix for this problem.

    Fix 2) Install the BIND 4.9.4 libraries and include files and
tweak the Makefile.AIX to use them - I *think* these Get It Right (if
not, at least it'll die during compile rather than failing weirdly at
runtime).

    Fix 3) Hack Makefile.AIX to pass a -DBIT_ZERO_ON_LEFT to cause the
headers to use the right #ifdefs.

------------------------------

Date:January 21, 1997
Subject: Q6 -- Additional information sources

    This probably isn't in strict RFC 1807 format, but I'm getting
closer.  Unfortunately, the format detailed in RFC 1807 was never
intended to be used in this fashion, so I'm doing a bit of square-peg
fitting into round holes.

    Note that the publisher ids that I've assigned should not be
misconstrued to imply that I have actually published all these
documents, it's just that I need some sort of reasonable entry for the
RFC 1807 "ID" field, and in lieu of information to the contrary
indicating what the actual publishers have registered, I have assigned
my own, independant, "third-party" IDs.  Hopefully, the bibliographic
entries below make it obvious who the real publishers of the various
documents are.


    6.1 Reference material devoted exlusively to sendmail

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/reference/1
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Reference manual, available online in printable format
    REVISION::  January 21, 1997; Updated URL & mailing list info
       TITLE::  Sendmail Installation and Operation Guide
      AUTHOR::  Allman, Eric
     CONTACT::  Eric Allman eric@Sendmail.ORG
                InReference, Inc.
                NASA Ames Technology Commercialization Center
                155-A Moffett Park Drive, Suite 104
                Sunnyvale, CA 94089
                Phone: 1+408 541-7615
                Fax:  1+408 734-4946
        DATE::  November 19, 1995
       PAGES::  69
   RETRIEVAL::  Contents of manual is in doc/op/op.ps of sendmail source
                    archive
     KEYWORD::  version 8.7.5 sendmail
    LANGUAGE::  English
       NOTES::  {g|n}roff "me" macro format version is in doc/op/op.me
                See: http://www.sendmail.org/

ABSTRACT::

The documentation written by Eric Allman himself, comes with the
sendmail distribution.  The file in doc/op/op.me (nroff "me" macro
format) may have a different number of pages depending on the type of
device it is printed on, etc....

Eric provides his free consulting in the form of continuing
development on sendmail, and occasional posts to comp.mail.sendmail.
Please don't be so rude as to ask him to provide further free
consulting directly to you.  If you (or your company) is willing to
compensate his for his consulting time, he may be willing to listen.
At the very least, you should make sure you've exhausted all other
courses of action before resorting to adding another message to the
thousands he gets per day.


Check the sendmail home page at http://www.sendmail.org/ for
late-breaking updates and other useful information.

If you want to be notified regarding future updates to sendmail and
other items of potential interest, you may want to subscribe to the
sendmail-announce mailing list.  Address your subscription requests
to "majordomo@lists.sendmail.org" with "subscribe sendmail-announce"
as the body of the message.


END:: sendmail-faq//online/reference/1

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/1-56592-056-2
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
    REVISION::  January 21, 1997; Updated info re: 2nd Ed.
        TYPE::  Reference book, hardcopy
       TITLE::  sendmail
      AUTHOR::  Costales, Bryan
      AUTHOR::  Allman, Eric
      AUTHOR::  Rickert, Neil
     CONTACT::  Bryan Costales bcx@BCX.COM
                O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
                103 Morris Street, Suite A
                Sebastapol, CA  95472
                Order by phone: 800-998-9938 (US/Canada inquiries)
                		800-889-8969 (US/Canada credit card orders)
                		707-829-0515 (local/overseas)
        DATE::  November, 1993
       PAGES::  792
   COPYRIGHT::  Copyright (c) 1993 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.  All rights
                    reserved.
    LANGUAGE::  English
       NOTES::  See: http://www.ora.com/gnn/bus/ora/item/sendmail.html

ABSTRACT::

The definitive reference for version 8 sendmail.

At least three printings of first edition have come out, and the
information above is for the first printing.

As of yet, this book has not been updated to include versions of
sendmail after 8.6.4.

Bryan provides his consulting to the world in the form of his book,
unless you're willing to compensate him for his services as well.
Like Eric, you should make sure you've exhausted all other courses of
action before you spend any of his valuable time.


The second edition has now been published (focussing exclusively
on version 8.8 sendmail), with an ISBN of 1-56592-222-0.  It has
been expanded to 1,050 pages long and expanded coverage of many
new topics too numerous to name.

END::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/1-56592-056-2

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/1-55558-127-7 
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Reference book, hardcopy
    REVISION::  Sep 9, 1996; fixed typo
       TITLE::  Sendmail: Theory and Practice
      AUTHOR::  Avolio, Frederick M.
      AUTHOR::  Vixie, Paul A.
     CONTACT::  Fred Avolio fma@al.org, Paul Vixie vix@al.org
                Digital Press 
                225 Wildwood Avenue 
                Woburn, MA 01801, USA 
                    Ordering Info: voice 1 800 366 2665 
                		     fax 1 800 446 6520 
        DATE::  1994
       PAGES::  262
   COPYRIGHT::  Copyright (c) by 1995 Butterworth-Heinemann
    LANGUAGE::  English
       NOTES::  See: http://www.vix.com/vix/smtap/

ABSTRACT::

Centers more on IDA sendmail (at least partly because version 8 didn't
exist when they began the book).  Written more like a college
Sophomore or Junior level textbook.

While you'll probably never let the Costales book out of your grubby
little hands (especially if you do much work with version 8 sendmail),
this is a book you'll probably read once or maybe twice, learn some
very valuable things, but then likely put on a shelf and not read or
reference again (unless you have to write up a bibliographic entry for
it).  Makes a better introduction to sendmail for management types,
especially if you don't want them getting their hands on too much
"dangerous" technical information.  Also a *lot* smaller and less
imposing.

If possible, I recommend getting both, but if you can only get one,
get Costales unless you're going to be working exclusively with IDA
sendmail, in which case Avolio & Vixie will probably be more useful.

Note that Paul Vixie is extremely busy working on further development
of BIND, the Internet de facto standard program for serving the DNS,
upon which all Internet services depend, mail being only one of them.
Like Eric and Bryan, he's also very busy.  Unless you're willing to
compensate him for his services, please let him get real work done.

END::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/1-55558-127-7 


    6.2 Reference material with chapters or sections on sendmail

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/0-13-151051-7
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Reference book, hardcopy
    REVISION::  May 23, 1996; Updated abstract.
       TITLE::  Unix System Administration Handbook, Second Edition
      AUTHOR::  Nemeth, Evi
      AUTHOR::  Snyder, Garth
      AUTHOR::  Seebass, Scott
      AUTHOR::  Hein, Trent R.
     CONTACT::  sa-book@admin.com
                Prentice-Hall, Inc.
                Upper Saddle River, New Jersey  07458
        DATE::  January, 1995
       PAGES::  780
   COPYRIGHT::  Copyright (c) 1995 by Prentice Hall PTR
    LANGUAGE::  English
       NOTES::  See: http://www.admin.com/

ABSTRACT::

Still the best hands-on Unix System Administration book around.
Covers far more than just sendmail, but the sixty-four pages (pages
455-518 in the third printing) it does devote are very well written
and quite useful.  Also provides a version of Rob Kolstad's
checksendmail script on the accompanying CD-ROM.

Note that Eric Allman and Marshall Kirk McKusick wrote the Foreword
for the Second Edition.  This should give you at least an inkling as
to how essential this book is, even for experienced Unix
administrators.

END::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/0-13-151051-7

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/0-201-58629=0
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Reference book, hardcopy
    REVISION::  March 27, 1996; Changed ID format to include ISBN,
                    moved URL to NOTES field from OTHER_ACCESS field,
                    also updated ABSTRACT
    REVISION::  March 29, 1996; Updated ID, PAGES, COPYRIGHT, and ABSTRACT
       TITLE::  Practical Internetworking With TCP/IP and UNIX
      AUTHOR::  Carl-Mitchell, Smoot
      AUTHOR::  Quarterman, John S.
     CONTACT::	tic@tic.com
                Addison Wesley Publishing Company
                Computer Science & Engineering Division
                One Jacob Way
                Reading, MA  01867
                USA
                Orders: voice://800-822-6339 (USA)
                	fax://617-942-1117
        DATE::  1993
       PAGES::  476
   COPYRIGHT::  Copyright (c) 1993 by Addison-Wesley Publishing
                    Company, Inc.
    LANGUAGE::  English
       NOTES::  See http://heg-school.aw.com/cseng/authors/mitchell/
                    practical/practical.html

ABSTRACT::

Devotes 50 pages (most of chapter 8) to discussion of sendmail.  As
far as TCP/IP networking books go that also happen to discuss
sendmail, it seems well-written and clear (better than I recall Hunt's
book being), but rather dated in the face of books devoted to the
topic and all the recent development activity in the sendmail
community.  Forget about the references, though.  The newest
sendmail-related reference listed is dated 1983, ten years before the
date on this book and most certainly wildly out-of-date now.

There are other books written on the subject of Internetworking with
TCP/IP (most notably Comer), but this particular book seems to have a
unique mix of theory (if perhaps a bit dated) and practical advice.
Other books tend to have lots of one or the other, or split their
theory and nitty-gritty details into separate books in a series (like
Comer).

Assuming that an update will be coming out soon, it probably deserves
a place on the shelf of most System or Network Administrators, right
next to _Internetworking with TCP/IP_ by Comer, _Managing Internet
Information Services_ by Liu, et. al., _DNS and BIND_ by Albitz and
Liu, _Unix System Administration_ by Nemeth, et. al., and last, but
certainly not least, _sendmail_ by Costales.  However, it deserves
this place more because of the non-sendmail related material, as
opposed to what sendmail-related material there is.

END::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/0-201-58629-0

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/0-937175-82-X
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Reference book, hardcopy
    REVISION::  March 27, 1996; Changed ID format to include ISBN,
                    moved URL to NOTES field from OTHER_ACCESS field
       TITLE::  TCP/IP Network Administration
      AUTHOR::  Hunt, Craig
     CONTACT::  O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
                103 Morris Street, Suite A
                Sebastapol, CA  95472
                Order by phone: 800-998-9938 (US/Canada inquiries)
                		800-889-8969 (US/Canada credit card orders)
                		707-829-0515 (local/overseas)
        DATE::  August, 1992
       PAGES::  502
    LANGUAGE::  English
       NOTES::  See: http://www.ora.com/gnn/bus/ora/item/tcp.html

ABSTRACT::

The book I learned sendmail from when there was no other book in print
that even mentioned the name.

Here primarily for historical purposes, especially with respect to the
sending of Internet mail and the DNS.  Some of the other TCP/IP
networking stuff is relevant, but this book is getting more and more
dated as time goes by.

END::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/0-937175-82-X


    6.3 Reference material on subjects related to sendmail

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/1-56592-010-4
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Reference book, hardcopy
    REVISION::  January 21, 1997; Updated info re: 2nd Ed.
       TITLE::  DNS and BIND
      AUTHOR::  Albitz, Paul
      AUTHOR::  Liu, Cricket
     CONTACT::  O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
                103 Morris Street, Suite A
                Order by phone: 800-998-9938 (US/Canada inquiries)
                		800-889-8969 (US/Canada credit card orders)
                		707-829-0515 (local/overseas)
        DATE::  October 1992
       PAGES::  418
   COPYRIGHT::  Copyright (c) 1992 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.  All rights
                    reserved.
    LANGUAGE::  English
       NOTES::  See: http://www.ora.com/gnn/bus/ora/item/dns2.html

ABSTRACT::

As definitive as Costales is on sendmail, this book is on the subject
of the Domain Name System (DNS) and the most common server software
for the DNS, namely BIND.

It hasn't been updated yet to reflect the massive changes that
happened with BIND 4.9.3 (and the recent flurry of related activity in
the DNS community), but even as old as it is, it still stands the test
of time as the one book *every* DNS/Domain Administrator should have
on their shelf.

Since the sending of Internet mail is so very heavily dependant on the
DNS, it obviously also belongs on the shelf of any Postmaster or
System Administrator whose site does Internet email.  And that means
virtually every administrator of every site on the Internet.


This book has recently been updated with a second edition, ISBN
1-56592-236-0 and 438 pages.  It includes updated discussion of
BIND 4.9.4, as well as many other topics.

END::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/1-56592-010-4

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/0-937175-93-5
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Reference book, hardcopy
    REVISION::  March 27, 1996; Changed ID format to include ISBN,
                    moved URL to NOTES field from OTHER_ACCESS field
       TITLE::  Managing UUCP and Usenet
      AUTHOR::  Todino, Grace
      AUTHOR::  O'Reilly, Tim
     CONTACT::  O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
                103 Morris Street, Suite A
                Order by phone: 800-998-9938 (US/Canada inquiries)
                		800-889-8969 (US/Canada credit card orders)
                		707-829-0515 (local/overseas)
        DATE::  January 1992
       PAGES::  368
    LANGUAGE::  English
       NOTES::  See: http://www.ora.com/gnn/bus/ora/item/muucp.html

ABSTRACT::

The definitive book for installing and managing UUCP.

The general assumption with version 8 sendmail is that virtually no
one uses UUCP to send email anymore, but if that assumption isn't true
for you, then you probably need this book.

END::  sendmail-faq//book/ISBN/0-937175-93-5


    6.4 World-wide web index/resource pages on sendmail

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/index/10
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Online sendmail index
    REVISION::  March 27, 1996; moved URL from RETRIEVAL field to
                    OTHER_ACCESS field.
       TITLE::  comp.mail.sendmail FAQ Support Page
      AUTHOR::  Knowles, Brad
     CONTACT::  Brad Knowles brad@etext.org
OTHER_ACCESS:: 	http://www.his.com/~brad/sendmail/
    LANGUAGE::  English

ABSTRACT::

Support Page for this FAQ.

END:: sendmail-faq//online/index/10

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/index/17
       ENTRY::  March 25, 1996
        TYPE::  Online sendmail index
    REVISION::  March 27, 1996; moved URL from RETRIEVAL field to
                    OTHER_ACCESS field.
       TITLE::  comp.mail.sendmail Most Frequently Asked Questions Support Page
      AUTHOR::  Assman, Claus
     CONTACT::  Claus Assmann ca@informatik.uni-kiel.de
OTHER_ACCESS:: 	http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~ca/email/english.html
    LANGUAGE::  English

ABSTRACT::

Most Frequently Asked Questions on comp.mail.sendmail and their
answers.  Also has some links to a few other resources.

END:: sendmail-faq//online/index/17


 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/index/11
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Online sendmail index
    REVISION::  May 23, 1996; Updated abstract.
       TITLE::  Henry's sendmail Page!
      AUTHOR::  Farkas, Henry
     CONTACT::  Henry Farkas hfarkas@ims.advantis.com
OTHER_ACCESS:: 	http://newstand.ims.advantis.com/henry/sendmail.html
    LANGUAGE::  English

ABSTRACT::

Has collected a few direct pointers to a few places, although I prefer
to either have pointers to well-known index sites and let them do the
hard work for me or do myself the work of making my site one of those
well-known indexes.

Still, worth taking a look at.

END:: sendmail-faq//online/index/11


 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/resources/22
       ENTRY::  November 24, 1996
       TITLE::  IICONS Sendmail Resources
      AUTHOR::  Caloca, Paul
     CONTACT::  Paul Caloca pcaloca@iicons.com
   COPYRIGHT::  Copyright (c) 1996 Paul Caloca. All Rights Reserved.
OTHER_ACCESS::  http://www.iicons.com/sendmail/index.html
    LANGUAGE::  English

ABSTRACT::

Provides information on how to compile Sendmail and the NEWDB
db.1.85 for Solaris 2.  Also has a section on which Sun patches
update Solaris 2 to BIND 4.9.3.

Has pointers to some non-Sun/Solaris sendmail resources, especially
including CERT Advisories related to sendmail.


END:: sendmail-faq//online/index/22


    6.5  World-wide web index pages and other reference on Internet
            email in general

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/index/12
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Online general Internet email index
    REVISION::  March 27, 1996; moved URL from RETRIEVAL field to
                    OTHER_ACCESS field.
       TITLE::  Internet Mail Consortium web site
 CORP-AUTHOR::  Internet Mail Consortium
     CONTACT::  info@imc.org
OTHER_ACCESS::  http://www.imc.org/
    LANGUAGE::  English

ABSTRACT::

If it has to do with Internet email, you'll probably find it here or a
link to it from here.

They have or have information on email-related Usenet FAQs, RFCs,
Internet Drafts (documents that are in the process of becoming RFCs),
IETF Working Groups, security standards, and are running a few
email-related mailing lists.

Tends to be focussed on the standards issues.

If you care about Internet email, you should make it your duty in life
to check this site frequently.

END:: sendmail-faq//online/index/12

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/index/13
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Online general Internet email index
    REVISION::  August 20, 1996; Updated URL.
       TITLE::  Email References
      AUTHOR::  Wohler, Bill
     CONTACT::  Bill Wohler wohler@worldtalk.com
OTHER_ACCESS::  http://www.worldtalk.com/html/msg_resources/email_ref.html
    LANGUAGE::  English

ABSTRACT::

The most exhaustive index site I know of for Internet email related
documents outside of the Internet Mail Consortium.

Also has pointers to other organizations that relate to Internet
email, such as the Electronic Messaging Association and the European
Electronic Messaging Association.

Tends to be focussed on the server and standards issues.

END:: sendmail-faq//online/index/13

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/index/14
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Online general Internet email index
    REVISION::  June 28, 1996; Added acronym for SMTPRD
       TITLE::  SMTP Resources Directory (SMTPRD)
      AUTHOR::  Salamon, Andras
      AUTHOR::  Knowles, Brad
     CONTACT::  Andras Salamon smtprd@dns.net
OTHER_ACCESS::  http://www.dns.net/smtprd/
    LANGUAGE::  English

ABSTRACT::

Another good index site, but still very much in the early phases of
gestation.  Based very heavily on the DNS Resources Directory, also by
Andras Salamon, at http://www.is.co.za/dnsrd/.

A well-rounded site, for the amount of material it covers so far.

END:: sendmail-faq//online/index/14

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/index/15
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Online general Internet email index
    REVISION::  March 27, 1996; moved URL from RETRIEVAL field to
                    OTHER_ACCESS field.
       TITLE::  E-Mail Web Resources
      AUTHOR::  Wall, Matt
     CONTACT::  Matt Wall <wall+@cmu.edu> 
OTHER_ACCESS::  http://andrew2.andrew.cmu.edu/cyrus/email/email.html
    LANGUAGE::  English

ABSTRACT::

Another good index site, tends to be more focussed on client side and
LAN email packages.  Also lists some email services, which no one else
that I've seen appears to have taken the time to catalog.

Excellent side-by-side feature comparison of various MUAs and their
compliance with various Internet protocols.

END:: sendmail-faq//online/index/15


    6.6 Online tutorials for sendmail

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/tutorial/9
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Online sendmail tutorial
    REVISION::  March 27, 1996; moved URL from RETRIEVAL field to
                    OTHER_ACCESS field.
       TITLE::  Sendmail V8: A (Smoother) Engine Powers Network Email
      AUTHOR::  Reich, Richard
     CONTACT::  Richard Reich richard@reich.com
        DATE::  February 8, 1996
   COPYRIGHT::  Copyright (c) 1995 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
                    All Rights Reserved.
OTHER_ACCESS:: 	http://www.unixworld.com/unixworld/archives/95/tutorial/
                    008/008.txt.html
    LANGUAGE::  English
       NOTES::  UnixWorld Online: Tutorial: Article No. 008

ABSTRACT::

Good technical introduction.  Some useful references.  Notably does
not reference this FAQ as a place to get more information.

END:: sendmail-faq//online/article/9

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/tutorial/16
       ENTRY::  March 23, 1996
        TYPE::  Online sendmail tutorial
    REVISION::  March 27, 1996; moved URL from RETRIEVAL field to
                    OTHER_ACCESS field.
       TITLE::  Sendmail -- Care and Feeding
      AUTHOR::  Quinton, Reg
     CONTACT::  Reg Quinton reggers@julian.uwo.ca
                Computing and Communications Services
                The University of Western Ontario
                London, Ontario N6A 5B7
                Canada
        DATE::  March 24, 1992
OTHER_ACCESS::  ftp://ftp.sterling.com/mail/sendmail/uwo-course/
                    sendmail.txt.Z
    LANGUAGE::  English
       NOTES::  Postscript version also available.  See ftp://ftp.sterling.com/
                mail/sendmail/uwo-course/sendmail.ps.Z

ABSTRACT::

Dated.  Only here until I find better.

END:: sendmail-faq//online/tutorial/16

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/tutorial/21
       ENTRY::  March 27, 1996
        TYPE::  Online sendmail tutorial
       TITLE::  Explosion in a Punctuation Factory
      AUTHOR::  Bryan Costales
     CONTACT::  Becca Thomas editor@unixworld.com
        DATE::  January 1994
   COPYRIGHT::  Copyright (c) 1995 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
                    All Rights Reserved.
OTHER_ACCESS:: 	http://www.unixworld.com/unixworld/archives/94/tutorial/
                    01/01.txt.html
    LANGUAGE::  English

ABSTRACT::

Good introduction on how sendmail re-write rules work.

END:: sendmail-faq//online/article/21


    6.7  Online archives of mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups,
            relating to Internet email

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/archive/18
       ENTRY::  March 25, 1996
        TYPE::  Online Usenet newgroup archive
    REVISION::  March 27, 1996; moved URL from RETRIEVAL field to
                    OTHER_ACCESS field.
       TITLE::  DejaNews
OTHER_ACCESS::  http://www.dejanews.com
    LANGUAGE::  English
       NOTES::  Archives/indexes only Usenet news.

ABSTRACT::

The first, and still most focussed, Usenet news archive/index site.
Others archive/index news as well as other things, but none that I've
seen do it better.

Go to "Power Search" then "Query Filter" if you wish to restrict the
newsgroups you search on to something like just comp.mail.sendmail and
not all newsgroups.

END:: sendmail-faq//online/archive/18

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/archive/19
       ENTRY::  March 25, 1996
        TYPE::  Online Usenet newgroup archive
    REVISION::  March 27, 1996; moved URL from RETRIEVAL field to
                    OTHER_ACCESS field.
       TITLE::  AltaVista
OTHER_ACCESS::  http://www.altavista.digital.com
    LANGUAGE::  English
       NOTES::  Archives/indexes Usenet news and World-wide web pages.

ABSTRACT::

One of the leading indexes of world-wide web pages, and their
archive/index of Usenet news is obviously secondary.

END:: sendmail-faq//online/archive/19

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/archive/20
       ENTRY::  March 25, 1996
        TYPE::  Online Usenet newgroup archive
    REVISION::  July 9, 1996; Additional information based on experience
       TITLE::  InReference
OTHER_ACCESS::  http://www.reference.com
    LANGUAGE::  English
       NOTES::  Not officially online yet, in final stages of beta

ABSTRACT::

Has promise to be the best Usenet news/publicly accessible mailing
list index/archive site in the world.  We'll see how well it delivers
on this promise.  It's in the final stages of beta testing (and is now
open to the public), and seems quite solid.  I haven't yet figured out
how to really make proper use of the underlying power I'm sure is
there, but it looks good.  Of course, you'll need to wait a little
while as they backfill their archives before searches will turn up all
that much information, but it already compares favourably to DejaNews.

Some of the best minds I know of are working on this project, so if it
can be done, I figure they can do it.

END:: sendmail-faq//online/archive/20

 BIB-VERSION::  CS-TR-v2.1
          ID::  sendmail-faq//online/archive/21
       ENTRY::  May 24, 1996
        TYPE::  Online archive of spam/junkmail
       TITLE::  list-managers spam discussion archives
      AUTHOR::  Gilman, Al
     CONTACT::  Al Gilman asgilman@access.digex.net
OTHER_ACCESS::  http://www.access.digex.net/~asgilman/spam/
OTHER_ACCESS::  ftp://www.access.digex.net/~asgilman/spam/
    LANGUAGE::  English

ABSTRACT::

These collections of past mail from the list-managers discussion list
can be retrieved by ftp or HTTP.

For anonymous ftp, open ftp.digex.net and cd to
/pub/access/asgilman/spam.

For http, G)o to http://www.access.digex.net/~asgilman/spam/ In this
directory you will find, _inter alia_, two files which are mail
folders:

    spam	-- collects examples of spams
    spam-NOT 	-- collects discussion of spam countermeasures

END:: sendmail-faq//online/archive/21

------------------------------

Date:July 9, 1996
Subject: Q7 -- THANKS!


Special thanks to:

    Eric Allman		The core of the material here comes from
                	his FAQ for version 8.6.9 sendmail.  I
                	couldn't even have gotten started were it
                	not for him.  And if he hadn't written
                	sendmail, there obviously wouldn't even
                	be a FAQ.  Heck, there might not even be an
                	Internet.

    Paul Southworth     Provides FAQ posting services, useful
                	comments on various sections, and the
                	mailclient-faq.  I couldn't have kept
                	doing this were it not for his help.

    Ed Ravin	    	Virtually all the material regarding the
                	use of sendmail on AIX is his, and most
                	of it has been carried over verbatim.

Thanks also to:

    Neil Hoggarth, Andras Salamon, Johan Svensson, Christopher X.
    Candreva, Bill Wohler, Matthew Wall, Henry W. Farkas, Claus
    Assmann, Curt Sampson, Rebecca Lasher, Jim Davis, David Keegel,
    Betty Lee, Alain Durand, Walter Schweizer, Christophe Wolfhugel,
    Al Gilman, Valdis Kletnieks, John Gardiner Myers, Paul DuBois,
    Adam Bentley, Dave Sill, Dave Wreski, Paul Caloca, Eamonn
    Coleman, Michael Fuhr, Betty Lee, Derrell Lipman, and the
    readers and posters of comp.mail.sendmail.

------------------------------

Comments/updates should be sent to sendmail-faq@etext.org.

Copyright 1996, by Brad Knowles, all rights reserved

End of comp.mail.sendmail Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), part 2 of 2
***********************************************************************



[Content]
Claus Aßmann Please send comments to: <ca@sendmail.org>