sendmail coredumps in smtpmessage

[ramey at ti-csl]

I have been having some trouble with sendmail and smtp.  Occasionally,
sendmail coredumps when delivering mail via smtp.  It dies in a call
to fprintf in smtpmessage.  I put in some extra debug info and
discovered that some failure occurs in smtpinit, and the program goes
to tempfail:.  I am guessing that the failure occurs when sendmail is
waiting for the greeting message (but I don't know for sure).  That
is, the connection is made successfully, but the server never greets
the user.  Then smtpquit is called, which wants to send the QUIT
message to the server.  The question is: if sendmail doesn't receive
the greeting message, is it okay if it assumes the connection is dead,
and doesn't send the QUIT message?  Why is the fprintf failing?  Is
the tcp connection closing somehow?  Is there a way to check if the
connection is still open before going ahead with the write?

Joe Ramey
Texas Instruments, Computer Science Center, Dallas
ramey at ti-csl.csnet     {ut-sally!im4u,convex!smu, texsun, rice}!ti-csl!ramey