Sendmail rejects incoming messages with large number of 'received' headers

[Wayne Sierke]

My FreeBSD mail server includes a getmail/sendmail/maildrop combination
which occasionally fails when getmail retrieves a message via POP which
has a large number of 'received' headers which result in it being
rejected by sendmail. Is there some way of convincing sendmail to accept
these messages, other than arbitrarily increasing MaxHopCount?

I have applied the 'no_delivered_to' and 'no_received' options to
getmail to suppress its additional header insertion but the messages in
question already have enough headers (from having been caught up in a
loop somewhere on their way to the external POP server) to cause
sendmail to reject them.

Currently I am forced to delete the message manually from the POP
server.

Surprisingly I haven't been able to locate any details about how to deal
with this situation. All the info I can find either simply re-states the
sendmail doc re MaxHopCount "The  maximum  number  of  times  a message
is allowed to ``hop'' before we decide it is in a loop." or discusses a
local mis-configuration issue resulting in a local mail delivery loop.
It makes me wonder whether I'm missing something quite obvious? 


Thanks,

Wayne