A bunch of problems with zmailer

[Swen Thuemmler <swen@uni-paderborn.de>]

Hi,

this weekend we replaced sendmail with zmailer-2.99.42. The good news is
that it reduced the load on the mailserver considerably, and it reduced
the delays for mails to a local mailinglist.

The bad news is, we had (and have) some problems with zmailer. Some things
don't work as we know it from sendmail - and some of them are important
for us. I'll try to summarize these problems below in the hope someone
more knowledgeable can provide a solution.

1. Expansion of Aliases and Mailinglists seems to have some bugs. To
explain: we have our forward files in /var/spool/mail/forward/username to
avoid automounting each homedirectory just for looking up the .forward.
The users must be able to change their forward, but not to change or
create the file for another user. So /var/spool/mail/forward has owner
root and mode 755. Every user gets an empty forward by default, of which
she is the owner (to be able to change it).
Now we have a lot of local mailinglists (for each workgroup, for students,
for the departement and so on). To avoid maintenance overhead, many lists
are just the join of some others, e.g. we have

ag-informatik:	ag-prof1, ag-prof2, ag-prof2, ...
fb17:		ag-informatik, ag-mathematik, studenten
studenten:	studenten-informatik, studenten-mathematik

These lists are not disjunct, so some people are in multiple lists, and
some lists contain just one entry. This creates a problem. If I have the
following alias:

test: ulla, swen, test2

and a list in /etc/mail/lists with the entry ulla

and /var/spool/mail/forward/ulla exists and is empty, I get:

z# router test1
<root.interactive@pbinfo.uni-paderborn.de>: address: test1
(((local ulla ulla g2)) ((local swen '"|/usr/local/procmail/bin/procmail
-t"' g3)) (error expansion /etc/zmailer/lists/test2))
z# 

There seems to be a problem with the removal of duplicate addresses in
aliases.cf which leads to this error. As a result, the router dumped core
in this case.

Temporary solution was to change all one-line lists to aliases, but there
must be a better way.


2. (this is perhaps related) Sendmail did quite reliably remove duplicate
addresses from list expansions. This does not seem to work with zmailer
and is a reason of complaints from our users. Is there a solution?


3. Why the TAB after the colon in From: and Subject: ?


4. I can't get EXPN and VRFY to work on smtpserver. This is what I get:
vrfy swen@uni-paderborn.de
250 Swen Thuemmler <swen>
501 5.4.0 Unable to verify that address


5. A warning. Don't compile with -xO2 on solaris, this seems to break
mailbox and some other programs. We had some cases of lost mail (most in
combination with elm).


6. We have some hosts with broken Charon mailers, which cannot grok more
than one SMTP connection at a time. One of these has an MX for another
host. Now I tried to configure scheduler to make only one connection to
this host. I tried:

smtp/*physik.uni-paderborn.de
smtp/*chemie.uni-paderborn.de
        maxring=1
        command="smtp -8 -s" # -l /var/log/mail/smtp"

but this resulted in a lot of warning messages in /var/log/mail/scheduler:
No command defined for smtp/physik.uni-paderborn.de!




Phew, I think thats it for now.

It would be great, if someone could help me with these problems


Greetings, Swen