Re: sendmail and starttls failing
On Mon, Jul 01, 2024 at 09:34:39 +0100, Mark Fletcher wrote:
> cron isn’t a mail sending tool — not the right place to police something
> like this. Seems to me that sendmail is.
There are two possible layers here. First, a cron job (typically a
shell command, or a shell script) might invoke mailx(1) or mail(1)
directly. In this case, it's the responsibility of mailx or mail to
format and transmit the message correctly when it invokes the
/usr/sbin/sendmail program.
The second case, which is much more common, is that cron(8) itself
invokes /usr/sbin/sendmail to inject a message whenever a job writes
output to either stdout or stderr. This output is captured by cron,
and then emailed to the job's owner.
hobbit:~$ strings /usr/sbin/cron | grep sendmail
/usr/sbin/sendmail
Looks like cron is doing what I would expect. In this case, it's cron's
responsibility to make sure the message is correctly formatted.
If cron is injecting mail that /usr/sbin/sendmail is rejecting due to
bare LF or bare CR (for whichever implementation of /usr/sbin/sendmail
is installed), then this is a bug in cron.
If your cron job is calling mailx or mail directly, and one of those
tools is injecting a message that gets rejected due to bare LF or bare CR,
then this is a bug in mailx or mail, and should be reported as such.
The same applies to any CLI MUA -- mutt, nail, s-nail, Mail, etc. Also,
note that mailx has multiple implementing packages in Debian, at least
two that I know of: bsd-mailx and mailutils. Make sure you file your
bug reports against the correct packages.
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