Re: use of 'sendmail -t'

["Greg A. Woods" <woods@weird.com>]

[ On Tuesday, May 6, 2003 at 06:13:50 (-0400), Richard Stallman wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: use of 'sendmail -t'
>
> I believe fencepost is running exim.  Can you tell me how to verify
> that it is really exim?
 
I wasn't able to get Exim to build with just a very quick try in
NetBSD's pkgsrc, however I was able to find the following paragraph in
Exim's manual (exim-4.10/doc/spec.txt):

       If there are any "Resent-" headers in the message, an error is
       generated, and Exim gives up. RFC 2822 talks about different sets of
       "Resent-" headers (when a message is resent several times), and it is
       not at all clear how -t should operate in this situation. Experiments
       with Sendmail have shown that it amalgamates multiple sets of "Resent-"
       headers when -t is used. This does not seem to be in the spirit of RFC
       2822.

This does indeed suggest that Exim is one of the few, and maybe only,
sendmail-compatible mailer which does not support "Resent-*" destination
headers in combination with use of 'sendmail -t'.

On the other hand Exim does appear to do most of the right things for
fixing up incomplete header sets and rewriting addresses in "Resent-*"
headers that already exist.

I would suggest that the best approach for mail/sendmail.el to to take
in light of this bug would be to check which "sendmail" is available on
the host system by running "sendmail -bV" and looking for indications
that the interface is implemented by Exim.  If so then perhaps the old
code could be conditionally used.

In the mean time I will submit a proposal to Philip Hazel suggesting
that he re-evaluate his position on the support of "Resent-*" headers
when '-t' is used and hopefully Exim will soon become compatible with
Sendmail, Smail, Postfix, and other sendmail-compatible mailers.

BTW, I was able to get command-line access to a system running Postfix
and I have confirmed that Postfix does work just as Sendmail and Smail
do, with the minor exception that Postfix does not support the
additional feature of ignoring any addresses that are also specified on
the command-line with '-t'.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;           <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>