Shell scripts from smail/sendmail - strange behavior

[Neil Rickert]

In article <1990Oct14.135213.28213 at athena.mit.edu> jik at athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) writes:
>                                                                And get
>Berkeley to change this behavior of sendmail, which has been around forever
>(ane which has been wrong for nearly forever :-).  Actually, that last part
>may not be relevant -- I'm testing with version 5.61, and version 5.64 may
>have fixed this problem.
>
 It is not so clear to some of us that sendmail's behavior is wrong.
Infuriating - yes.  Wrong - I don't think so.

 The ideal would be for sendmail to read my mind, and follow its current
behavior when I want that, and Kamen's preferred behavior at other times.

 Basically it is trying to allow permissions to control who can send email
to a programatic mailer (such as the msgs command which posts notices).  You
can always get Kamen's preferred behavior by means of suid programs.  But if
his preference were the default it would be difficult to get the other
behavior without doing extensive sender checking in program mail handlers.

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert at cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115.                                  +1-815-753-6940