Very Computer

The Solaris 8 vacation(1) man page state in no uncertain terms

|   vacation will also not respond to mail from either  postmas-
|   ter or Mailer-Daemon.

But this simply isn't true: it seems to treat such senders (in any
domain) exactly like any others.

I have a suspicion that it's been like this for a long time. I recently
did a stint as postmaster (to which Mailer-Daemon is also routed) for one
domain, and was amazed by the amount of vacation-generated junk it received.
The regular postmasters seemed to think it was just a fact of life... :-(

Does anyone know how things got like this? "strings /usr/bin/vacation"
does reveal "Postmaster" & "MAILER-DAEMON". If I open a call with Sun,
am I likely to get the program fixed? :-) or the man page changed? :-(

Chris Thompson

p> This is standard behavior.

I suppose I must believe that no-one else is seeing this effect, then!
But just what is different in our environment? :(

p> Are those messages generated by vacation on your SUN or by vacation-like
p> software on other systems?
[woes due to Microsoft Exchange omitted]

No, this is definitely the Solaris /usr/bin/vacation - I have looked at
the .forward files of the users involved.

We run Exim rather than Sendmail as MTA on our major systems, so just
in case that had something to do with it (although I can't really imagine
why) I repeated some experiments on a practically pristine Solaris 8
workstation, with the latest sendmail patch (110615-01) applied, using
only local mail.

I set up a bog-standard vacation environment for cet1, with the .forward
file containing:

\cet1, "|/usr/bin/vacation cet1"

I provoked an error report to be sent to it, by attempting to send mail
to a non-existent recipient, and it duely arrived, looking like this in
/var/mail/cet1:

| From MAILER-DAEMON Wed Jun 20 15:05:42 2001
| Return-Path: <MAILER-DAEMON>
| Received: from localhost (localhost)
|         by mallard.csi.cam.ac.uk (8.10.2+Sun/8.10.2) id f5KE5fn04638;
|         Wed, 20 Jun 2001 15:05:41 +0100 (BST)
| Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 15:05:41 +0100 (BST)
| From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <MAILER-DAEMON>

| To: cet1
| MIME-Version: 1.0
| Content-Type: multipart/report; report-type=delivery-status;
|         boundary="f5KE5fn04638.993045941/mallard.csi.cam.ac.uk"
| Subject: Returned mail: see transcript for details
| Auto-Submitted: auto-generated (failure)
| Content-Length: 1332
| Status: RO
|
| This is a MIME-encapsulated message
|
| --f5KE5fn04638.993045941/mallard.csi.cam.ac.uk
|
| The original message was received at Wed, 20 Jun 2001 15:05:41 +0100 (BST)

|
|    ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----

|     (reason: 550 Host unknown)
[etc., etc.]

But, contrary to expectations [ well, yours, but not mine by this stage :) ]
this generated a vacation message to MAILER-DAEMON, which looked like this:

| From cet1 Wed Jun 20 15:05:43 2001
| Return-Path: <cet1>

|         by mallard.csi.cam.ac.uk (8.10.2+Sun/8.10.2) id f5KE5gE04641
|         for MAILER-DAEMON; Wed, 20 Jun 2001 15:05:42 +0100 (BST)
| Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 15:05:42 +0100 (BST)

| To: MAILER-DAEMON
| Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
| Mime-Version: 1.0
| From: cet1 (via the vacation program)
| Subject: away from my mail
| Content-Length: 135
| Status: RO
|
| I will not be reading my mail for a while.
| Your mail regarding "Returned mail: see transcript for details" will be read when I return.

The only modification the /etc/mail/aliases from the Solaris default on
this system was the addition of a "root: cet1" line, so that the last
message actually comes back to cet1:

   mailer-daemon -> postmaster -> root -> cet1

Any ideas on why /usr/bin/vacation behaves differently in Cambridge will
be gratefully received! :)

Chris Thompson

"No more than 5 percent of the population is capable of being educated.
Education, 'the educing, leading out, drawing out of the latent powers
on an individual.' 95 percent have nothing to be'drawn out' or
developed. Imbeciles, cretins, morons get Master's degrees, or the
school industry would shut down." E. Hoffman Price

I now understand this a bit better. If vacation sees a line on stdin like

then it doesn't generate any reply, as specified. But if it sees an
*unqualified* address, as

 From MAILER-DAEMON Sat Jun 30 23:59:59 2001

then it treats it like any other address: the test against "Mailer-daemon"
and "Postmaster" apparently never gets made in this case.

This is unfortunate, as the way that MTAs (including sendmail) represent
a null return path (a.k.a. envelope sender) in this context is to use the
unqualified name "MAILER-DAEMON" in the initial "From " line.

Chris Thompson

Quote:>This is unfortunate, as the way that MTAs (including sendmail) represent
>a null return path (a.k.a. envelope sender) in this context is to use the
>unqualified name "MAILER-DAEMON" in the initial "From " line.

--Per Hedeland