* * * * *
                                        
                   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/

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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