Problem with alias length in base Sendmail

[Spil Oss]

Hi All,

Today I ran into the BUG documented in the aliases man-page.

       If you have compiled sendmail with DBM support instead  of  NEWDB,  you
       may  have  encountered problems in dbm(3) restricting a single alias to
       about 1000 bytes  of  information.   <snip>

Looking at Sendmail, it is compiled with NEWDB so the restriction
would not apply.

# sendmail -d0.1 -bv root
Version 8.14.3
 Compiled with: DNSMAP LOG MAP_REGEX MATCHGECOS MILTER MIME7TO8 MIME8TO7
                NAMED_BIND NETINET NETINET6 NETUNIX NEWDB NIS PIPELINING SCANF
                STARTTLS TCPWRAPPERS USERDB XDEBUG

If my alias (including whitespace) exceeds ca. 1000 characters,
running `make aliases` will report an error.
   /etc/mail/aliases: line 320: alias too long
Resulting in an aliases.db file without the too long alias
   550 5.1.1 <alias1 at example.org>... User unknown
Which means to me that the alias is simply skipped and the rest of the
aliases database is installed.

There is a workaround documented with the bug in the man-page, but I'd
very much like to understand why this is failing.

FreeBSD gw.example.org 7.2-RELEASE-p1 FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE-p1 #2: Thu
Jun 11 12:58:02 CEST 2009
root at gw.example.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/MYKERNEL  i386

Kind regards,

Spil