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Re: sendmail bug?



On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, David Stern wrote:

 : $ man aliases
 : 
 :   [..]
 :   Loops can not occur, since no message will be sent to any person
 :   more than once.
 :   [..]
 : 
 : "Loops cannot occur, ..".  So, if I make an alias for tsawyer to hfinn, 
 : and an alias for hfinn to dstern, and I send a mail to tsawyer, then 
 : who should get it?
 : 
 : First I thought that meant hfinn should get it, but that clearly does 
 : not occur.  When I read "loops cannot occur", I get a sense of 
 : absolute, iow if I make an alias from tsawyer to hfinn, then mail sent 
 : to tsawyer goes to hfinn, no matter what alias I make for hfinn.  
 : Otherwise, a loop would occur if I were to alias dstern back to the 
 : tsawyer.
 : 
 : If this isn't a bug, then the man page is either erroneous, or appeals 
 : to a form of logic that I don't understand.
 : 
 : All I really want is to mail for root to go to dstern, and for mail to 
 : real-root to go to root, not get looped back to dstern.  How can I do 
 : this?
 : 
 : Someone in the know, please lend a clue to the uninitiated.  Thanks.

I can't think of an easy way to do this using only /etc/aliases and/or
.forward files since aliases are edited in turn - that is "real-root"
evaluates to "root", but "root" evaluates to "dstern".

If it is acceptable, you could set an alias like this:

	root:	root,dstern

It is this situation the manpage addresses ... mail to "root" will be
delivered to root's mailbox AND to dstern.  (See?  No loops :> )

I suppose you could then install a procmail rule for root that nulls all
mail not explicitly addressed to "real-root".

--
Nathan Norman
MidcoNet  410 South Phillips Avenue  Sioux Falls, SD
mailto:finn@midco.net           http://www.midco.net
finger finn@home.midco.net for PGP Key: (0xA33B86E9)



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