🚀 go-pugleaf

We have just a new version of VMS (5.5?) and a new version of Ultrix
(4.2a) and mail between the two is behaving very peculiarly.

Everything else works including dlogin dcp dls and DECwindows
and the equivalent operations from the VMS side. But mail seems
broken. It behaves much the same with the utk-mail11//IDA-sendmail
or with the distributed mail11v3 and sendmail although I can get
debugging output from utk-mail11d.

The main problem is incoming mail. Running VMS mail to send mail
to a user on the ultrix machine hangs at the To: prompt.
At this point there is a mail11v3d on the Ultrix machine which
just hangs doing nothing. Killing the mail11vd3 process wakes up
the VMS mail.

If I use utk-mail11d with the debugging switch I can see that it hangs
at the point where it is supposed to supply a list of recipients.

We are using Phase V DECnet/OSI on the Ultrix machine and Phase IV on
the VMS machine.

Since the DECnet connections seem to work (other wise all the other
things would break) and this behaviour can be observed using old
code for mail11d and sendmail, I tend to the hypothesis that there
has been some change in the mail11 protocol (or else a bug in the
VMS implementation).

Curiously, if I mail from Ultrix to a VMS user who has their mail
forwarded back to Ultrix, the mail gets through (at least sometimes)
but the header tends to be mangled (Subject ends up in the CC field
etc).

I am tearing my hair out and I don't have a lot left, so any help
would be very much appreciated.

-- 
 Ian Dall           life (n). A sexually transmitted disease which afflicts
                              some people more severely than others.
   ACSnet: idall@augean.oz
 Internet: idall@augean.oz.au