Subject: mailwrapper has very bad failure mode
To: None <current-users@netbsd.org>
From: D'Arcy" "J.M. <darcy@druid.druid.net>
List: current-users
Date: 04/16/1999 10:43:58
I just rebuilt a system with NO_SENDMAIL set to yes in /etc/mk.conf
thinking that my smail setup was safe.  I woke up this morning after
leaving the system doing a make build to complaints that mail was not
working.  Upon investigation I discovered that even though I told it
not to compile sendmail, it still replaced all my links with links to
mailwrapper but since there was no /etc/mailer.conf, all the mail was
lost.  I have fixed this now on my system but this is an extremely bad
failure mode.  Is it possible to create a simple mail program, just
a shell script really, that takes it's input and puts it into a safety
directory and make that script the default program if there is no config
file?  Maybe that functionality could even be built into the mailwrapper
program.  If that had been done I could have moved those files into
the input directory and people's mail would have been late but at least
it would not have been lost.

-- 
D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@{druid|vex}.net>   |  Democracy is three wolves
http://www.druid.net/darcy/                |  and a sheep voting on
+1 416 424 2871     (DoD#0082)    (eNTP)   |  what's for dinner.