On Thu, 19 Mar 1998, Lazlo Nibble wrote:
> The site where my majordomo mailing lists live runs exim as its MTA. From
> time to time, people who join a mailing list will suddenly get a collection of
> messages that were posted to the list shortly before they joined. This is
> *not* a majordomo feature -- in fact it's come up before on majordomo-users as
> a bug, and was explained away there as a problem with smail, to wit:
>
> * Message A is posted to the list, delivered to most users, remains in
> queue for further retrys to a handful of addresses.
>
> * Subscriber Z joins the list, gets intro messages, starts to get new
> messages as they're posted to the list.
>
> * smail walks the queue to look for pending deliveries, finds message A, and
> *checks the list subscriber file for addresses it has not yet delivered
> that message to* (i.e., it keeps its own "successful deliveries" state but
> relies on the list subscriber file (an :include: alias under sendmail,
> dunno how it's handled under smail or exim) for the "intended recipients"
> list).
>
> * smail sees subscriber Z on the subscriber list but not on the
> "successfully delivered" list, so it sends Z a copy of message A
> even though Z wasn't actually on the list with A was posted.
>
> I don't know if that's really how smail works, but that's the story I heard.
>
> THE QUESTION: is it possible for this to happen under exim as currently
> (or recently) designed?
Yes. Exim works in exactly the same way if you let it do the list
expansion. There are benefits. If an incorrect address in the list (or,
more usually, a user's .forward file) gets corrected, Exim doesn't keep
on trying the old, bad version.
Is this a serious problem rather than a quirky oddity? It would be a
fair bit of work to provide an option to do otherwise.
--
Philip Hazel University Computing Service,
ph10@??? New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
P.Hazel@??? England. Phone: +44 1223 334714
--
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http://www.exim.org/ ***
