Sendmail / Email copy - Fixed

[admin at kclinux.net]

I thought it would loop too, but when I tested it, it didn't.  All of the
aliases are on a different machine.  It's sending the emails to their Sprint
PCS phones.  8165551212 at sprintpcs.com and 8165551212 at airmessage.net (note
it's not the real number in the email address, but the same domain.) As for
a vacation script, there wouldn't be one.  It's just what php/formmail
script sends via email to emergency at domain.com when one of their clients
enters an emergency ticket via their web site.  A php form that they fill
their name, phone, and IP address, and it sends it to emergency at domain.com,
but since they wont be having anyone at the office or monitoring email from
11pm to 5am any more, they needed a way to be notified if one of their
clients needs them in the middle of the night.  So the guy went to Radio
Shack, bought 6 Sprint PCS phone and they already had the pager, all of
which have an email address for text messaging.

But I do see what your saying.  I added other aliases which didn't have a
local account by the same name, and it worked fine.  But when I made an
alias as the same name as a local account, it wasn't being sent to the alias
name.  So after playing for a while, I ended up trying the newaliases
command, which did send the aliases the message, but not the local account.
So I played around and did a "what if" with the emergency account at the
end, and then the aliases and the local account was getting the emails.  

I'm going to try the procmail script that was mentioned earlier at a later
date, or when the alias screws up. 


-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com]
On Behalf Of Tom 'Needs A Hat' Mitchell
Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2004 4:15 PM
To: For users of Fedora Core releases
Subject: Re: Sendmail / Email copy - Fixed

Remember that you can escape expansion in aliases.  If you look at it
you had built a loop:

  emergency: them, us, emergency

Think about how the loop expands, Compare with 

  emergency: them, us, \emergency

What if you had done this ;)  

  emergency: them, us
  them:	     bob, carol, ted, emergency
  us:	     fred, jed, alice, emergency

Could you detect it and find it to fix it.
What if one of these involved aliases on a second machine?
What if one user had a bad vacation script?  ;-)

The good news is that the newer sendmail is smart enough to not do bad
things for the simple errors.  At one time it would hurl big chunks.
But garbage in is still garbage out....