The email sent out from our library catalogue program has begun to
act in a curious way since the system was upgraded. Problems were
seen with two sorts of messages: those sent to our book suppliers
with details of orders, and those sent to users who had requested
an email copy of the results of a catalogue search.
The headers of typical messages of these two sorts are:
order request:
Received: from iiiord by serlib0 with local (Exim 2.05 #3)
id 1283VR-00080C-00; Tue, 11 Jan 2000 15:46:49 +0000
To: ukbisac@???
Subject: Innopac Orders
Reply-To: iiiord
Reply-To: iiiord@???
Message-Id: <E1283VR-00080C-00@serlib0>
From: INNOPAC Orders <iiiord@???>
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 15:46:49 +0000
search results:
Received: from exporter by serlib0 with local (Exim 2.05 #3)
id 125tx7-0000Lh-00; Wed, 5 Jan 2000 17:10:29 +0000
To: clarem@???
Subject: Export E-Mail
Reply-To:
Message-Id: <E125tx7-0000Lh-00@serlib0>
From: Essex Univ Lib <exporter@???>
Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2000 17:10:29 +0000
Note the two Reply-To fields in the first case, and the blank one in
the second.
It is not clear to me how an MTA should respond to these. In practice,
exim both delivered the message to the recipient, and sent a failure
message to the sender saying:
"A message that you sent contained no recipient addresses, and
so no delivery could be attempted"
The suppliers of the library program refused to investigate the problem,
as we were running Exim rather than sendmail. I thus reverted to running
sendmail v 5.65, and the problems went away.
This rather surprised me, as I believed exim to be a sendmail replacement
(although it is perhaps unfair to expect it to respond to messages with
faulty headers in the same way sendmail does).
I should prefer to run Exim everywhere, rather than Exim everywhere
except on one library machine. Is there any way I can configure Exim
to act like sendmail is these cases?
