What makes sendmail do this?

[Paul Pomes - UofIllinois CSO]

jik at athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) writes:

>In article <542 at motto.UUCP>, murray at motto.UUCP (Murray S. Kucherawy) writes:
>|> I'm working on configuring a sendmail daemon, and I have it completely
>|> functional, except when receiving mail for local users, I get this:
>|> 
>|>    ----- Transcript of session follows -----
>|> mail: Options MUST PRECEDE persons
>|> 554 <murrayk at server1>... unknown mailer error 5
>|> 
>
>  Well, since you did not provide your sendmail.cf file, I can only guess at
>what the problem is, but a pretty good guess is that the command line
>specification for the local mailer specification is screwed up.
>
>  For example, my local mailer specification looks like this:
>
>	Mlocal, P=/bin/mail, F=rlsDFMmn, S=8, A=mail -d $u
>
>I suspect you've got the "$u" and the "-d" switched, like this:
>
>	Mlocal, P=/bin/mail, F=rlsDFMmn, S=8, A=mail $u -d
>
>At least, that's what the error message you're getting seems to imply.

Another cause I've seen is that some /bin/mail programs don't like 'r'
in the Flags section.  Try it as 

	Mlocal, P=/bin/mail, F=lsDFMmn, S=8, A=mail -d $u

The best thing to do is to compare entries for the local mailer against
a sendmail.cf file that's known to work on your system.
--
         Paul Pomes

UUCP: {att,iuvax,uunet}!uiucuxc!paul   Internet, BITNET: paul at uxc.cso.uiuc.edu
US Mail:  UofIllinois, CSO, 1304 W Springfield Ave, Urbana, IL  61801-2910