🚀 go-pugleaf

We've had a recent problem with mail coming in over ethernet and are
interested in hearing from others who may have had similar problems and
warning the rest of you.

The symptoms are simple and unmistakable: sendmail gags on incoming
enet mail and writes a single line of the incoming message into its
df* file ad infinitum (or until you crash with a full disk). I can't
tell if the local sendmail infinite loops all by itself, or if it does
it in collaboration with the remote sendmail. As much of the mail as
is received seems perfectly kosher; however, we only receive it up to
a point before going into the loop.

This doesn't happen with all mail; in the last 5 weeks we have had only
three occurences (two of those with the same remote system and on the 
same day). The problem has only occured with systems that are reached
via route through a gateway; mail on our lan never gives us this problem. 

As a temporary fix (to prevent us from crashing), we attempted to put
a cap on the size of email through our ether mailer by adding the
expression 'M=100000' to the definition of our ether mailer (in
sendmail.cf).  The documentation suggests that this should limit mail
passing through the mailer to 100000 bytes; however, we had an
incident of this problem two nights ago (the first in 5 weeks) and the
cap didn't work.

********************************************

On another matter, what has happened with the Ridge Users Group? We
had a great first meeting; however, since then the silence has been
deafening.

lsf@costello.caltech.edu
Sam Finn
Theoretical Astrophysics
California Institute of Technology