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

Jon Carnes jonc at nc.rr.com
Fri May 23 15:43:25 EDT 2003


Jeremy you are using a BCC so this has no effect:

 NoRecipientAction=action
   Set the behaviour when there are no recipient headers (To:,
   Cc: or Bcc:) in the message to action: none leaves the mes-
   sage unchanged, add-to adds a To: header with the envelope
   recipients, add-apparently-to adds an Apparently-To: header
   with the envelope recipients, add-bcc adds an empty Bcc:
   header, and add-to-undisclosed adds a header reading `To:
   undisclosed-recipients:;'.



On Fri, 2003-05-23 at 14:29, Jeremy Portzer wrote:
> 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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