Patches for sendmail

Last Update 2001-08-02

Content

Some of these patches are unofficial and unsupported, use at your own risk!

Patches for the sendmail binary

Known problems in sendmail 8.11

sendmail 8.11.4 has a race condition when sending a HUP signal to restart the daemon. This could terminate the current process without starting a new daemon. A new (2001-06-25) patch is available
If you get the error main: setreuid(1, 0) failed: Operation not permitted when running sendmail 8.11.4, then you need to recompile -DHASSETREUID=0, e.g., add
```
APPENDDEF(`confENVDEF', `-DHASSETREUID=0')
```
to your devtools/Site/site.config.m4 file and run sh ./Build -c etc.
Both problems are solved in 8.11.5.
sfio 1999 might have a bug.
sendmail 8.11.0 has a problem if:
- it has been compiled with STARTTLS support
- the OS doesn't support /dev/urandom(4),
- your confRAND_FILE isn't set or is unusable,
- you try to send e-mail to an MTA that offers STARTTLS.
In this case the TLS handshake will fail and the mail will be queued. Solution: if you compile sendmail with STARTTLS support make sure your PRNG is seeded.
This problem is fixed in sendmail 8.11.1

There is a problem on some Solaris versions with putc() which returns EOF if 0xff is used as argument and the buffer is flushed. A patch based on the changes made for sendmail 8.11 should fix the problem; otherwise e-mails which contain 0xff may "grow" to huge sizes.

Known problems in sendmail 8.10.0

sendmail 8.10.0 has the following known problems (which were discovered after the release by some users):

AIX 4.x needs this line
```
define(`confLDOPTS', `-bnolibpath -blibpath:/usr/lib:/lib')
```
in
```
devtools/OS/AIX.4*
```
(check your AIX version and replace the '*' accordingly) to avoid a possible security hole.
If sendmail is configured to use SMTP AUTH as client, it can leak information.

Both problems are fixed in sendmail 8.10.1.

Known problems in sendmail 8.10 caused by other software

sendmail 8.10.{0,1} seems to have a problem on Solaris 7 and 8 when used in conjunction with Berkeley DB 3 if both are compiled with gcc instead of Sun's C compiler. Apply a patch from Sleepycat.

sendmail 8.9

sendmail 8.9.3 requires a patch in some cases that may cause duplicated MIME headers. This patch also fixes another MIME related problem (a Content-Transfer-Encoding: header might be removed).
sendmail 8.9.3 may require a patch to deal with a wrong free() in a signal handler.
sendmail 8.9.3 may require a patch to avoid an alignment problem on a Sun SPARC running RedHat Linux (courtesy of Per Hedeland).
The MIME buffer overflow patch for sendmail 8.9.1 has a small bug, it can be fixed by a patch which has been written by John Beck.

Patches for the sendmail configuration files

sendmail 8.9.1 has a bug with respect to the prevention of unauthorized relay attempts which can be fixed by a patch for cf/m4/proto.m4 . It is fixed in sendmail 8.9.2.
sendmail 8.9.x (x < 2) has a bug wrt the Realtime Blackhole List which can be fixed by a patch for cf/m4/proto.m4.

[(links)] [Hints] [Avoiding UBE] [cf/README] [New]

Disclaimer: the information provided may be inaccurate or outdated or incomplete. Please contact me if you find an error.