4.2 lost mail

[Chuck Privitera]

I know this article shouldn't go to net.unix-wizards, but the
original was posted there. 

In article <276 at uw-beaver> Voradesh Yenbut writes:

> I found that sendmail, compiled with DBM defined, does not call
> initaliases() before it processes queued mails.  So, it will fail
> when looking for an alias name of a local recipient.  As quoted from
> Version.c of sendmail,

>> D 4.16	83/10/16 16:08:08	eric	382	381
>> MRs:	
>> Postpone opening the alias DBM file until after the fork in srvrsmtp so
>> that the alias database is as current as possible; thanks to dagobah!efo
>> (Eben Ostby) for this one.

> it looks like sendmail version 4.16 and above may have this kind of
> problem.

I don't know about you, but my sendmail does alias expansion when
the mail is queued. In the mainline code for sendmail, there is a
switch which does alias initialization only if:
	1. You are running as newaliases (or -bi option given)
	2. You are not running in daemon mode.
Thus, alias expansions are done when you submit mail, so the
only time the daemon has to worry about doing alias expansions
is when mail is submitted via SMTP. And as the note in Version.c
says, initaliases is called in srvrsmtp.

My question is this: has anybody installed this and is it really
necessary?