[Mailman-Developers] mm-handler 2.1.10 (was:beforenextrelease:disable backscatter in default installation)

[David Champion]

> As I understand it (possibly wrong), the way this
> 
> 	if ($DEBUG) {
> 		$to = join(',', @to);
> 		print STDERR "to: $to\n";
> 		print STDERR "sender: $sender\n";
> 		print STDERR "server: $server\n";
> 		exit(-1);
> 	}
> 
> works is it exits with an error, so sendmail returns an undeliverable
> status/notice containing the script output.
> 
> Obviously, your logging is much nicer.

Correct.  But as previously noted, syslog might not log anything at all
on some systems -- that's why mm-handler didn't use it originally.  And
this is debugging code, not meant for live environments....


> I have another question since I don't know sendmail. Does sendmail
> execute mm-handler at incoming SMTP time, and if so, does an error
> exit from mm-handler result in an SMTP failure status being returned
> to the sending MTA?

Yes.  It's a local delivery agent mapped to your mailing lists' virtual
domain, and it's the final step in an SMTP transaction.  In a production
environment it should exit with one of the statuses from <sysexits.h>.
That will trigger an SMTP failure to the sending MTA with a message
appropriate to that exit status.


> If so, it seems that rather than just dropping a 'bad' message as
> mm-handler seems to do when $BounceUnapproved = 0; and $BounceNonlist
> = 0;, wouldn't it be better to exit with a failure status.

FWIW, I agree.

-- 
 -D.    dgc at uchicago.edu    NSIT    University of Chicago