On Tue, 24 Mar 1998, Philip Hazel wrote:
> > Presumably, sendmail's behavior in this case [sendmail -t address] is
> > undocumented (or should be an error).
>
> I don't know about newer versions of sendmail, but on the man page for
> sendmail for Solaris 2.3 it says:
>
> -t Read message for recipients. "To:", "Cc", and "Bcc:" lines will
> be scanned for people to send to. The "Bcc:" line will be deleted
> before transmission. Any addresses in the argument list will be
> suppressed.
>
> I *thought* I was making Exim sendmail-compatible in this regard.
The bat book, ("Sendmail, 2nd edition", O'Reilly and associaties, 1997)
says rather ambiguously in section 36.7.38
-t
The -t command-line switch causes sendmail to gather its list of
recipients form the message's head in addition to gathering them from
its command line. The -t switch takes no arguments.
So, it looks like Solaris is doing something different. But the
document continues ...
When this switch is specified, sendmail gathers recipient names from
the To:, Cc:, and Bcc: header lines. It also gathers recipient names
from its command line if any were listed there. Duplicates are
discarded, and the message is delivered to all that remain.
So, the key issue is the reading of "duplicates are discarded" and
"all that remain". It could mean that it discards duplicates in
the way that uniq(1) eliminates duplicates, or it could behave
the way that exim 1.82 does and is documented for solaris. All,
I know is that with sendmail 8.8.5 and 8.7.5, the line in my dnews.conf
of
/usr/lib/sendmail -t %s
did deliver to addresses such as "news" which were specified in %s and
in the To line of the input.
So, I think that trying to be compatible with sendmail is not
easy. I also assume that dnews users who have been working on
Solaris should have noticed this, though I it is possible that the
line I was complaining about in dnews.conf was something that I put
in locally a long time ago. (I'm too lazy to go back and look in
the distribution.)
-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826
Cranfield Computer Centre FAX 751 814
J.Goldberg@??? http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice.
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