mailtool and sendmail 8.8?
> Has anyone successfully gotten mailtool and Sendmail 8.7 or 8.8 to
> happily interoperate? I'm trying to upgrade the shipped sendmail on
> my Solaris 2.5 machines to Sendmail 8.8, but /usr/openwin/bin/mailtool
> won't cooperate. With mailtool running, sendmail holds the email in
> /var/spool/mqueue and won't deliver it to /var/mail until mailtool is
> exited. There appear to be no errors; sendmail just won't deliver it.
> The same thing happened with Sendmail 8.7 as well, I recall. Sendmail
> can be forced to deliver the message by deleting /var/mail/username.lock,
> but this isn't a very nice thing to do to mailtool (not to mention not
> an acceptable solution to the mailtool users). A truss on the 8.8
> sendmail binary and the mailtool binary didn't show me anything odd,
> but then I may not have been looking for the right signs.
The solution:
procmail. Not sendmail, procmail. The problem (according to the
author of procmail, who may or may not be biased) is that mailtool
is busted. As several people correctly guessed, I'm using procmail
with my Sendmail 8.8 installation. Procmail and mailtool do not agree
on how kernel level locking should be performed, so procmail must be
built with them disabled (this is in the FAQ- I just had to know which
FAQ to read... ;^) Since I have to stick with mailtool -- I've got lots
of entrenched users who are quite happy with it -- and since crippling
procmail in this manner would make it less than 100% reliable, I'll
just go with mail.local for my local mail delivery agent. Not a
perfect solution, but it'll work. Procmail will still be out there
for those who want it through their .forward files...
Thanks to
Jochen Bern <bern@penthesilea.uni-trier.de>
Tony Jago <tony@fit.qut.edu.au>
Claus Assmann <ca@informatik.uni-kiel.de>
Jerry Champlin <jgc@hhconductor.com>
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