Mail to programs only works sometimes??

[Andrew S. Partan]

We are having strange problems here with mail to programs.

We have one alias 'paper' that sends the message to lpr.  We have an
internal mailing list 'engine' that goes to a number of people and also
via recnews into a newsgroup.  We are also on some outside mailing
lists with aliases that send the messages via recnews into newsgroups.

Now for the weird part:  Sometimes this works and sometimes it does
not.  The mail always gets to the people on the lists (or postmaster,
if postmaster is on the list), but will sometimes die when it gets to
the program.  Sometimes everything works & sometimes everything does
not.  It seems to depend on the phase of the moon.  Also, I can not
always stop error messages from going back to the sender of the
message.  The error message is always "Unknown user:" with no user
given.  There is no more info in syslog either.

The switch between working & not working comes when we rebuild our
alias database (when we change it).  We always rebuild both the YP
database and the 'normal' alias database (which is only on our master
YP server).  There does not seem to be any rhyme or reason between it
working or not working.

Relevant lines in our /usr/lib/aliases file are:

	# This sometimes works & sometimes does not.
	paper: "|lpr -J'Paper copies of Mail'"

	# This sometimes works, but usually does not.
	isode-list: postmaster,cos-isode at cos.com
	owner-isode-list: postmaster
	cos-isode: "|/usr/local/lib/recnews cos.isode '' Submittal"
	owner-cos-isode: postmaster

	# This sometimes works, but usually does not.
	engine: people,people,people,people,cos-engine at cos.com
	owner-engine: postmaster
	cos-engine: "|/usr/local/lib/recnews cos.engine '' Submittal"
	owner-cos-engine: postmaster

	# This seems to work all of the time.  There does not seem to
	# be any diff between these and the ISODE aliases.
	telecom-list: postmaster,cos-telecom at cos.com
	owner-telecom-list: postmaster
	cos-telecom: "|/usr/local/lib/recnews cos.telecom '' Submittal"
	owner-cos-telecom: postmaster

	% ls -l /usr/lib/aliases*
	-rw-r--r--  1 root        31908 Jun 30 17:16 /usr/lib/aliases
	-rw-r--r--  1 root         4096 Jun 30 17:18 /usr/lib/aliases.dir
	-rw-r--r--  1 root        73728 Jun 30 17:18 /usr/lib/aliases.pag

	% ls -l /etc/yp/cos/mail.aliases*
-rw-r--r--  1 root         4096 Jun 30 17:16 /etc/yp/cos/mail.aliases.dir
-rw-r--r--  1 root        65536 Jun 30 17:16 /etc/yp/cos/mail.aliases.pag

	# Sample error message:
	From: MAILER-DAEMON (Mail Delivery Subsystem)
	Subject: Returned mail: User unknown
	To: Postmaster

	   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
	550 User unknown

	  ----- Message header follows -----
	Received: by cos.com (3.2/smail2.2/04-17-87)
		id AA20861; Fri, 1 Jul 88 10:08:47 EDT
	Date: Fri, 1 Jul 88 10:08:47 EDT
	To: engine

We are using Sun OS 3.5 with Yellow Pages.  "cos" (aka "cos.com") is
our YP Master server.  There are 3 slave YP servers.  There are a whole
pile of clients.  The server (and its diskless clients) are the only
things running Sun OS 3.5, everything else is still running Sun OS
3.4.

We have asked Sun for help on this, but have gotten none yet (it seems
that all of their people are on vacation now).

If anyone has any clue as to what might be going on, please lets us
know.

Thanks,
	--asp (Andrew Partan @ Corporation for Open Systems)
	-- asp at cos.com or asp%cos.com at uunet.uu.net
	-- {uunet, sundc, decuac, hqda-ai, hadron}!cos!asp
	ASN.1 Object Identifier: "{joint-iso-ccitt mhs(6) group(6) 157}"
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