Problem with alias length in base Sendmail

[Spil Oss]

Hi jhell,

aliases can be used as mailing-lists........ (remember to also have a
<listname>-owner alias if you wish to use it that way)

And there is a work-around, also documented in the aliases man-page.
split it up in multiple parts that are lists again

mailinglist: mailinglist-part1, mailinglist-part2, mailinglist-part3

mailinglist-part1: recipient1 at example.org, recipient2 at example.net

mailinglist-part2: recepient3 at example.net, recipient4 at example.org

Still curious as to why the NEWDB in FreeBSD does not support more
than ca. 1000-bytes in an alias.

Kind regards,

Spil.

On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 7:03 PM, jhell <jhell at dataix.net> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>