Problem with alias length in base Sendmail

[jhell]

On Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:50, spil.oss@ wrote:
> 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
>

That's either one hell of a pipe or the owner of that email address can be 
proud that no-one will ever email him/her ;)

Can you post the alias in question ? Maybe there is another way that you 
could go about doing this if it is not just a test case trying to flaunt 
the adequate limits of sendmail.

--

  jhell