Folks,
We had a problem involving a nasty interaction between the ">From "
lines that procmail adds and AIX's plain "mail" client... below is a
copy of an e-mail that I sent to the user who complained about the
problem, explaining how I fixed it (he's rather technically inclined).
In any case... I'd like to at least publicise the cause of the
problem, as it was quite painful to figure out.
If there is interest, I can try to fix it up into proper FAQ form.
Louis
---forwarded message---
Well... it turned out to be a fairly major problem, as I had feared...
The latest sendmail on the latest AIX (don't know which causes it, but
it's irrelevant) somehow picks up the UID/GID of the sender (iff the
sender is local)... This somehow gets passed through to procmail which
does local delivery (superior to the native bellmail for a variety of
reasons)... which alludes to the problem in its man page:
When in explicit delivery mode, procmail will generate a
leading `From ' line if none is present. If one is already
present procmail will leave it intact. If procmail is not
invoked with one of the following user or group ids: root,
daemon, uucp, mail, x400, network, list, slist, lists or
news, but still has to generate or accept a new `From '
line, it will generate an additional `>From ' line to help
distinguish fake mails.
... and AIX's plain "mail" end up picking up this ">From " *header* as
being an actual "From " header (which it probably shouldn't, but
">From " headers shouldn't exist, either).
So, it becomes a mess... possible solutions would be to downgrade the
sendmail (not such a great idea, although I know it works - on account
of the undergrad server having that configuration), forgetting about
procmail for local delivery (seriously considered, but it has some
advantages over AIX's bellmail), finding an alternative plain "mail" -
or telling people to stay away from plain "mail" (other mailers don't
seem to choke on ">From ".
But... I chose to do the stupid thing :-)... I recompiled procmail to
put a header in the form:
X-Authentication-From: raphael Mon Feb 26 21:30:17 2001
instead of the
From: raphael Mon Feb 26 21:30:17 2001
form that it would have originally wanted to use.
I think that this will solve the problem, although there might still be
issues on account of already-received mail.
---end message---
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