K N O W N B U G S I N S E N D M A I L (for 8.9.0) The following are bugs or deficiencies in sendmail that I am aware of but which have not been fixed in the current release. You probably want to get the most up to date version of this from ftp.sendmail.org in /pub/sendmail/KNOWNBUGS. For descriptions of bugs that have been fixed, see the file RELEASE_NOTES (in the root directory of the sendmail distribution). This list is not guaranteed to be complete. * Null bytes are not handled properly in headers. Sendmail should handle full binary data. As it stands, it handles all values in the body, but only 0x01-0x80 and 0xA0-0xFF in the header. Notably missing is 0x00, which would require a major restructuring of the code -- for example, almost no C library support could be used to handle strings. * Duplicate error messages. Sometimes identical, duplicate error messages can be generated. As near as I can tell, this is rare and relatively innocuous. * $c (hop count) macro improperly set. The $c macro is supposed to contain the current hop count, for use when calling a mailer. This macro is initialized too early, and is always zero (or the value of the -c command line flag, if any). This macro will probably be removed entirely in a future release; I don't believe there are any mailers left that require it. * If you EXPN a list or user that has a program mailer, the output of EXPN will include ``@local.host.name''. You can't actually mail to this address. It's not clear what the right behavior is in this circumstance. * \231 considered harmful. Header addresses that have the \231 character (and possibly others in the range \201 - \237) behave in odd and usually unexpected ways. * accept() problem on SVR4. Apparently, the sendmail daemon loop (doing accept()s on the network) can get into a weird state on SVR4; it starts logging ``SYSERR: getrequests: accept: Protocol Error''. The workaround is to kill and restart the sendmail daemon. We don't have an SVR4 system at Berkeley that carries more than token mail load, so I can't validate this. It is likely to be a glitch in the sockets emulation, since "Protocol Error" is not possible error code with Berkeley TCP/IP. I've also had someone report the message ``sendmail: accept: SIOCGPGRP failed errno 22'' on an SVR4 system. This message is not in the sendmail source code, so I assume it is also a bug in the sockets emulation. (Errno 22 is EINVAL "Invalid Argument" on all the systems I have available, including Solaris 2.x.) Apparently, this problem is due to linking -lc before -lsocket; if you are having this problem, check your Makefile. * accept() problem on Linux. The accept() in sendmail daemon loop can return ETIMEDOUT. An error is reported to syslog: Jun 9 17:14:12 hostname sendmail[207]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root): getrequests: accept: Connection timed out "Connection timed out" is not documented as a valid return from accept(2) and this was believed to be a bug in the Linux kernel. Later information from the Linux kernel group states that Linux 2.0 kernels follow RFC1122 while sendmail follows the original BSD (now POSIX 1003.1g draft) specification. The 2.1.X and later kernels will follow the POSIX draft. * Excessive mailing list nesting can run out of file descriptors. If you have a mailing list that includes lots of other mailing lists, each of which has a separate owner, you can run out of file descriptors. Each mailing list with a separate owner uses one open file descriptor (prior to 8.6.6 it was three open file descriptors per list). This is particularly egregious if you have your connection cache set to be large. * Connection caching breaks if you pass the port number as an argument. If you have a definition such as: Mport, P=[IPC], F=kmDFMuX, S=11/31, R=21, M=2100000, T=DNS/RFC822/SMTP, A=IPC [127.0.0.1] $h (i.e., where $h is the port number instead of the host name) the connection caching code will break because it won't notice that two messages addressed to different ports should use different connections. * ESMTP SIZE underestimates the size of a message Sendmail makes no allowance for headers that it adds, nor does it account for the SMTP on-the-wire \r\n expansion. It probably doesn't allow for 8->7 bit MIME conversions either. * Paths to programs being executed and the mode of program files are not checked. Essentially, the RunProgramInUnsafeDirPath and RunWritableProgram bits in the DontBlameSendmail option are always set. This is not a problem if your system is well managed (that is, if binaries and system directories are mode 755 instead of something foolish like 777). * 8-bit data in GECOS field If the GECOS (personal name) information in the passwd file contains 8-bit characters, those characters can be included in the message header, which can cause problems when sending SMTP to hosts that only accept 7-bit characters. * 8->7 bit MIME conversion When sendmail is doing 8->7 bit MIME conversions, and the message contains certain MIME body types that cannot be converted to 7-bit, sendmail will strip the message to 7-bit. * 7->8 bit MIME conversion If a message that is encoded as 7-bit MIME is converted to 8-bit and that message when decoded is illegal (e.g., because of long lines or illegal characters), sendmail can produce an illegal message. * MIME encoded full name phrases in the From: header If a full name phrase includes characters from MustQuoteChars, sendmail will quote the entire full name phrase. If MustQuoteChars includes characters which are not special characters according to STD 11 (RFC 822), this quotation can interfere with MIME encoded full name phrases. By default, sendmail includes the single quote character (') in MustQuoteChars even though it is not listed as a special character in STD 11. * bestmx map with -z flag truncates the list of MX hosts A bestmx map configured with the -z flag will truncate the list of MX hosts. This prevents creation of strings which are too long for ruleset parsing. This can have an adverse effect on the relay_based_on_MX feature. * Saving to ~sender/dead.letter fails if su'ed to root If ErrorMode is set to print and an error in sending mail occurs, the normal action is to print a message to the screen and append the message to a dead.letter file in the sender's home directory. In the case where the sender is using su to act as root, the file safety checks prevent sendmail from saving the dead.letter file because the sender's uid and the current real uid do not match. * Berkeley DB 2.X race condition with fcntl() locking There is a race condition for Berkeley DB 2.X databases on operating systems which use fcntl() style locking, such as Solaris. Sendmail locks the map before calling db_open() to prevent others from modifying the map while it is being opened. Unfortunately, Berkeley DB opens the map, closes it, and then reopens it. fcntl() locking drops the lock when any file descriptor pointing to the file is closed, even if it is a different file descriptor than the one used to initially lock the file. As a result there is a possibility that entries in a map might not be found during a map rebuild. As a workaround, you can use makemap to build a map with a new name and then "mv" the new db file to replace the old one. * File open timeouts not available on hard mounted NFS file systems Since SIGALRM does not interrupt an RPC call for hard mounted NFS file systems, it is impossible to implement a timeout on a file open operation. Therefore, while the NFS server is not responding, attempts to open a file on that server will hang. Systems with local mail delivery and NFS hard mounted home directories should be avoided, as attempts to open the forward files could hang. (Version 8.36, last updated 2/4/1999)