If you think <tt>sendmail.cf</tt> is bad …

Mark [1] and I ended up helping John (the dot com paper millionaire and keyboardist for a Grateful Dead coverband) set up a new feature on his site. It involved deep hacking of both sendmail.cf and the Sendmail source code itself.

Some things we found out:

• Sendmail ignores the current environment setting, using its own environment when it runs.
• It's easy to see why sendmail has so many buffer overwrites—the code is attrocious.
• Sure, sendmail now allows you to name rule sets instead of number them (in sendmail.cf), but does it show the name when running in address test mode? Nooooooo …
• Network analyzers are fun. Very impressive the way they can determine cable length.
• Eric Allman has a lot of explaining to do.

We might have actually finished had John not crashed on us.

[1] http://www.conman.org/people/myg/

Gemini Mention this post

Contact the author