Mail received by wrong persons ...

[David A Rasmussen]

>From article <3494 at mipos3.intel.com>, by rpartha at cadev4.intel.com (Rajan Parthasarathy ~):
> 
> We have been experiencing a problem with mail. Mail is getting delivered to 
> people who are not on the address list.  The problem has happens infrequently,
> and is not reproducible.  We are running Ultrix V2.2 and VMS 4.6 at our site.
> 
> Some common features of the problem are :
> 
> 1. All occurrences were from an Ultrix V2.2 machine. The unintended recepients
>    were both on Ultrix and VMS.
> 
> 2. Addresses of unintended people were not in the mail header.
> 
> 2. In all known cases, the mailer used was Elm. It is not known if it
>     has happened with other mailers.
> 
> 3. The mails never got returned to the sender, i.e. no error messages.  It
>     is not known if all of the intended people received the mails.
> 
> Has anybody else experienced this/similar problem ? Any suggestions?

I am running elm at a 4.3 bsd-tahoe site. The same thing happens here
periodically. The current elm does not use flock() for locking, but I don't
know if this is causing problems with other mailers (sendmail, ucbmail, etc).

I got a sendmail log of the last time this happened to me. I had elm'd a 
message to a user mary, and then what looked like a reply to a student and our
consulting alias got the same message (and my were they confused). Anyhow,
not being a sendmail guru, I wonder if anyone sees anything the matter in
the following section of logfile?  I thought perhaps elm generated a temp file
name with the same uid, and sendmail sent one file with that uid and then
saw it again and redelivered it with the wrong addresses, but that was just
an initial guess that I didn't verify yet.

Anyways, here is the section of the logfile. My message to mary is 667 bytes.

Jan 25 11:43:14 csd4 sendmail[22336]: AA22336: message-id=<8901251743.AA22336 at csd4.milw.wisc.edu>
Jan 25 11:43:14 csd4 sendmail[22336]: AA22336: from=dave, size=984, class=0
Jan 25 11:43:18 csd4 sendmail[22347]: AA22336: to=pbhyf!rob at pacbell.pacbell.com, delay=00:00:06, stat=Deferred: Host Name Lookup Failure
Jan 25 11:43:19 csd4 sendmail[22347]: AA22336: to=elm-dev at dsinc.uucp, delay=00:00:07, stat=Deferred: Host Name Lookup Failure
Jan 25 11:45:00 csd4 sendmail[22563]: AA22563: message-id=<8901251744.AA22563 at csd4.milw.wisc.edu>
Jan 25 11:45:02 csd4 sendmail[22563]: AA22563: from=dave, size=667, class=0
Jan 25 11:45:03 csd4 sendmail[22497]: AA22497: message-id=<8901251744.AA22497 at csd4.milw.wisc.edu>
Jan 25 11:45:04 csd4 sendmail[22497]: AA22497: from=dave, size=667, class=0
Jan 25 11:45:08 csd4 sendmail[22589]: AA22563: to=mary, delay=00:00:12, stat=Sent
Jan 25 11:45:53 csd4 sendmail[22665]: AA22665: message-id=<8901251745.AA22665 at csd4.milw.wisc.edu>
Jan 25 11:46:22 csd4 sendmail[22718]: AA22718: from=dave, size=606, class=0
Jan 25 11:46:25 csd4 sendmail[22595]: AA22497: to=sasasam,mary,ed,eniko,dav,brunelli,jeff,brooks,neil,jgd,james,doug,david,andrew,young,davep,eric,harrison,wayne,steve,scott,floyd,erchul,davidc,davec,keith,terri,warren,gary,amit,jvm,stetzer,tracyo,tom,inglem,ms, delay=00:02:02, stat=Sent
Jan 25 11:46:26 csd4 sendmail[22737]: AA22718: to=mary, delay=00:00:10, stat=Sent
Jan 25 11:46:27 csd4 sendmail[22595]: AA22497: to=lu at elsinore, delay=00:02:04, stat=Deferred: Host Name Lookup Failure
Jan 25 11:46:29 csd4 sendmail[22595]: AA22497: to=jiang,bruno,jandelyn,aadcs, delay=00:02:06, stat=Sent
--
Dave Rasmussen c/o Computing Services Division @ U of WI - Milwaukee
Internet: dave at csd4.milw.wisc.edu  Uucp: uwvax!uwmcsd1!uwmcsd4!dave {o,o}
Any opinions expressed are my own.  Now, for a limited time, they can be yours
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