KNOWNBUGS revision 38032 
1
2
3	     K N O W N   B U G S   I N   S E N D M A I L
4			     (for 8.9.0)
5
6
7The following are bugs or deficiencies in sendmail that I am aware of
8but which have not been fixed in the current release.  You probably
9want to get the most up to date version of this from ftp.sendmail.org	
10in /pub/sendmail/KNOWNBUGS.  For descriptions of bugs that have been
11fixed, see the file RELEASE_NOTES (in the root directory of the sendmail
12distribution).
13
14This list is not guaranteed to be complete.
15
16
17* Null bytes are not handled properly in headers.
18
19  Sendmail should handle full binary data.  As it stands, it handles
20  all values in the body, but only 0x01-0x80 and 0xA0-0xFF in
21  the header.  Notably missing is 0x00, which would require a major
22  restructuring of the code -- for example, almost no C library support
23  could be used to handle strings.
24
25* Duplicate error messages.
26
27  Sometimes identical, duplicate error messages can be generated.  As
28  near as I can tell, this is rare and relatively innocuous.
29
30* $c (hop count) macro improperly set.
31
32  The $c macro is supposed to contain the current hop count, for use
33  when calling a mailer.  This macro is initialized too early, and
34  is always zero (or the value of the -c command line flag, if any).
35  This macro will probably be removed entirely in a future release;
36  I don't believe there are any mailers left that require it.
37
38* If you EXPN a list or user that has a program mailer, the output of
39  EXPN will include ``@local.host.name''.  You can't actually mail to
40  this address.  It's not clear what the right behavior is in this
41  circumstance.
42
43* \231 considered harmful.
44
45  Header addresses that have the \231 character (and possibly others
46  in the range \201 - \237) behave in odd and usually unexpected ways.
47
48* accept() problem on SVR4.
49
50  Apparently, the sendmail daemon loop (doing accept()s on the network)
51  can get into a weird state on SVR4; it starts logging ``SYSERR:
52  getrequests: accept: Protocol Error''.  The workaround is to kill
53  and restart the sendmail daemon.  We don't have an SVR4 system at
54  Berkeley that carries more than token mail load, so I can't validate
55  this.  It is likely to be a glitch in the sockets emulation, since
56  "Protocol Error" is not possible error code with Berkeley TCP/IP.
57
58  I've also had someone report the message ``sendmail: accept:
59  SIOCGPGRP failed errno 22'' on an SVR4 system.  This message is
60  not in the sendmail source code, so I assume it is also a bug
61  in the sockets emulation.  (Errno 22 is EINVAL "Invalid Argument"
62  on all the systems I have available, including Solaris 2.x.)
63  Apparently, this problem is due to linking -lc before -lsocket;
64  if you are having this problem, check your Makefile.
65
66* accept() problem on Linux.
67
68  Apparently, the accept() in sendmail daemon loop can return ETIMEDOUT
69  and cause sendmail to sleep for 5 seconds during which time no new
70  connections will be accepted.  An error is reported to syslog:
71
72  Jun  9 17:14:12 hostname sendmail[207]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root):
73			getrequests: accept: Connection timed out
74
75  "Connection timed out" is not documented as a valid return from
76  accept(2) and this was believed to be a bug in the Linux kernel.
77  Later information from the Linux kernel group states that Linux
78  2.0 kernels follow RFC1122 while sendmail follows the original BSD
79  (now POSIX 1003.1g draft) specification.  The 2.1.X and later kernels
80  will follow the POSIX draft.
81
82* Excessive mailing list nesting can run out of file descriptors.
83
84  If you have a mailing list that includes lots of other mailing
85  lists, each of which has a separate owner, you can run out of
86  file descriptors.  Each mailing list with a separate owner uses
87  one open file descriptor (prior to 8.6.6 it was three open
88  file descriptors per list).  This is particularly egregious if
89  you have your connection cache set to be large.
90
91* Connection caching breaks if you pass the port number as an argument.
92
93  If you have a definition such as:
94
95	  Mport,          P=[IPC], F=kmDFMuX, S=11/31, R=21,
96			  M=2100000, T=DNS/RFC822/SMTP,
97			  A=IPC [127.0.0.1] $h
98
99  (i.e., where $h is the port number instead of the host name) the
100  connection caching code will break because it won't notice that
101  two messages addressed to different ports should use different
102  connections.
103
104* ESMTP SIZE underestimates the size of a message
105
106  Sendmail makes no allowance for headers that it adds, nor does it
107  account for the SMTP on-the-wire \r\n expansion.  It probably doesn't
108  allow for 8->7 bit MIME conversions either.
109
110* Paths to programs being executed and the mode of program files are
111  not checked.  Essentially, the RunProgramInUnsafeDirPath and
112  RunWritableProgram bits in the DontBlameSendmail option are always
113  set.  This is not a problem if your system is well managed (that is,
114  if binaries and system directories are mode 755 instead of something
115  foolish like 777).
116
117* 8-bit data in GECOS field
118
119  If the GECOS (personal name) information in the passwd file contains
120  8-bit characters, those characters can be included in the message
121  header, which can cause problems when sending SMTP to hosts that
122  only accept 7-bit characters.
123
124* 8->7 bit MIME conversion
125
126  When sendmail is doing 8->7 bit MIME conversions, and the message
127  contains certain MIME body types that cannot be converted to 7-bit,
128  sendmail will strip the message to 7-bit.
129
130* 7->8 bit MIME conversion
131
132  If a message that is encoded as 7-bit MIME is converted to 8-bit and
133  that message when decoded is illegal (e.g., because of long lines or
134  illegal characters), sendmail can produce an illegal message.
135
136* MIME encoded full name phrases in the From: header
137
138  If a full name phrase includes characters from MustQuoteChars, sendmail  
139  will quote the entire full name phrase. If MustQuoteChars includes  
140  characters which are not special characters according to STD 11 (RFC  
141  822), this quotation can interfere with MIME encoded full name phrases. 
142  By default, sendmail includes the single quote character (') in
143  MustQuoteChars even though it is not listed as a special character in
144  STD 11.
145
146
147(Version 8.32, last updated 6/30/98)
148