[TriLUG] sendmail question -ONoRecipientAction=Add-To-Undisclosed

[Jeremy Portzer]

On Fri, 2003-05-23 at 14:17, Chris Hedemark wrote:
> 
> Jeremy, is your list of students fairly static?  Would it be 
> accommodated well by an alias in your MTA?
> 
> Even if it isn't fairly static, if your students were tracked in an 
> RDBMS already you could use a simple SELECT statement every time mail 
> was sent to a given alias to generate the recipient list.  The TO 
> header would then only have the name of the alias.
> 
[...]
> So you could say something like "trig101 at school.edu" expands into a 
> SELECT statement that returns all email addresses for students 
> currently enrolled in trig101.  If a student drops the class, they are 
> automagically dropped from the alias as soon as the change in status is 
> reflected in the back end RDBMS.
> 
> All of this is a lot easier, of course, if you're already using an 
> RDBMS back end for managing tables of students & classes.
> 

Thanks for the suggestions, Chris.  I understand there are much better
ways this can be done with a back-end RDMBS, and there is indeed an
extensive backend database system for this particular application. 
However, because it is third-party code, I'd like to keep any
modifications to a minimum.  If I could just get sendmail to behave as
documented, my problems would be solved!

If I do end up making more extensive modifications, it would be to use
Perl's SMTP modules to talk to sendmail via SMTP to localhost.  This
way, I could include something in the "To:" header, but have control
over the RCPT TO: lines (the envelope information).  The problem with
using "sendmail -t" is that the envelope information is derived from the
headers, so anything "bogus" that's put in the To: line won't be
ignored.

But seriously, having sendmail add the Undisclosed Recipient thing, as
the option mentioned in my subject is supposed to do, would solve the
problem in the most straightforward way.  Why would sendmail ignore this
option?  Is there a way to debug things so I can see what options it
thinks are in effect?

--Jeremy

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