Re: majordomo, sendmail 8.12, and aliases issues

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, Rob Mangiafico wrote:

> On Mon, 14 Mar 2005, Pettit, Paul wrote:
> 
> > > > > We have been running majordomo 1.94.5 successfully for a 
> > > long time using 
> > > > > sendmail 8.11.x. We recently switched to 8.12.11, and now 
> > > are having an 
> > > > > issue with alias list expansion.
> > > > >
> > > > > listname: "|/usr/local/majordomo/wrapper resend -l 
> > > listname listname-out"
> > > > > listname-out: :include:/usr/local/majordomo/lists/listname
> > > > >
> > > > > When an email is sent to the list, sendmail tries to 
> > > deliver the email to:
> > > > > [email protected]
> > > > >
> > 
> > I'm running much the same setup (sendmail 8.12.8-9.80, majordomo 1.94.5)
> > but I've not seen this behavor.
> > 
> > > > > instead of parsing the include list for sending to the 
> > > subscribers. It
> > > > > seems the MSP/MSA portion with submit.cf is causing the 
> > > problem. We can
> > > > > work around it by changing the $mailer command in 
> > > majordomo.cf by adding:
> > > > > -Am -OQueueDirectory=/usr/local/majordomo/queue
> > > > >

ok, was also posting at comp.os.sendmail, and I think we have figured it 
out. We had a virtusertable entry for the hostname of the server:
@hostname devnull

to stop any spam to the hostname of the server itself. Explanation from 
newsgroup (courtesy of Per Hedeland:
---
Rather, 8.11 had the MSP and MTA in one, i.e. when you invoked sendmail
directly it would do the actual delivery rather than passing it to the
local MTA. In 8.12 and later, the MSP doesn't make any delivery
decisions but just passes the message to the local MTA using SMTP - and
since it's SMTP, unqualified addresses like 'list-outgoing' will be
qualified with the local host name before the MTA receives the message.

This isn't normally a problem, since the MTA will basically just strip
off the the @hostname part and resolve to the local mailer => alias
lookup. You're preventing this by having an entry ('@hostname' ?) in
your virtusertable that matches list-outgoing@hostname, and does
something other than resolve to the local mailer - this didn't come into
play when the 8.11 MSP+MTA was passed just 'list-outgoing'.

You can:

- remove the virtusertable entry/ies that matches, or
- add specific entries 'list-outgoing@hostname list-outgoing' in
  virtusertable for your lists, or
- make the address passed to resend qualified with something that won't
  match your virtusertable entries, or matches entries that resolve to
  the local mailer - e.g. list-outgoing@domain or something.
---

So, we remove the catchall @hostname entry, and it now works as before. 
We've always had the @hostname with 8.11.x, so never would have thought 
this was the culprit. Of course now we have to figure out how to handle 
email at the hostname more cleanly, but at least it is working now. 
Further feedback on this issue or more discussion is welcome.

Thanks everyone for the help so far, it's been a fast learning curve for 
the new sendmail.

Rob