🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <rossc.705659410@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU> rossc@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU (Ross Cartlidge) writes:
>Unfortunately there was a flaw in this - sendmail fails badly
>when the mailer it calls doesn't exist. This caused mail to get
>bounced that was directed to MHS sites. When I was notified of this
>problem (Thanks to Jim Richardson) I stopped sendmail to stop
>mail from being accepted.
>
>I have disabled auto-booting to solve this problem in the future -
>does anyone know anything I could do to sendmail to make it
>behave differently in this situation.

I can think of one solution that you could have used if you were
running a version of sendmail that supported BSMTP (IDA sendmail for
example).  for the duration of the outage, you could have changed the
MHSnet mailer to write out BSMTP batches instead of passing them
into MHSnet.

When MHSnet came back up, you could change the MHSnet mailer back to
normal and give sendmail the BSMTP batches to process.  All the
messages should be reprocessed and passed to the MHSnet mailer, only
this time for real.

The only drawback I can think of is that there would be two Received:
headers in the message for your site, one from when it originally
arrived and the other when it was reprocessed.  I don't think this
would cause any major problems.  Perhaps some messages might exceed the
maximum hops but they would probably have been marginal anyway.

I haven't ever tried this so caveat utilitor.

	Ben.