Subject: smap usage error when encountering a long list of e-mail delivery addresses

From: "Todd Williams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 05:53:17 -0500

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What I'm seeing is that smap/smapd is discarding several e-mails due to the
length/number of addresses in the "To:" field of the e-mail messages.
(The names are changed to protect the innocent.)  FWTK 2.1 on Redhat 5.2

Here is a sample:

Feb  4 21:35:50 proxy smap[1972]: connect
host=foo.localnet.com/192.168.150.55
Feb  4 21:35:50 proxy smap[1972]: host=foo.localnet.com/192.168.150.55
bytes=504 from=<[email-masked]>
to=<[email-masked],[email-masked],username.
[email-masked],truncateduser@
Feb  4 21:35:50 proxy smap[1972]: exiting
host=foo.localnet.com/192.168.150.55 bytes=504
Feb  4 21:36:17 proxy smapd[1973]: discarding (usage error) pid=1974 code=64

This happens on a rather frequent basis, we have several mailing "lists" to
which we deliver messages.  The e-mails all seem to be delivered to the
appropriate addresses (including the truncated ones from the
/var/log/messages), however the smap/d program always sends a copy of the
"failed" e-mail message to postmaster based on the discarded (usage error).
I am guessing that this is because of smap/d's inability to handle a long
enough string of e-mail addresses.  Am I right?  (Does anybody know?)

While I realize there is more than one way to get out of this situation
(aliases for delivery lists, etc...), I find that probably the best feasible
solution, for us anyway in our case, is a modification to the smap/d program
to better handle the longer strings.  Has anybody noticed anything like this
in the past?  Is there an easy way to modify the source code to handle this?

Thanks for your help/advice in advance,

Todd Williams
Network Administrator

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