Subject: Returned Mail: User Unknown 71

Date: Thu, 11 Apr 91 13:00:22 EDT

From: Steve Strassmann <[email protected]>

To: UNIX-HATERS

Subject: pain, death, and disfigurement

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READ THESE NOTES BEFORE MAKING CHANGES TO THIS FILE: thanks!

Since aliases are run over the yellow pages, you must issue the

following command after modifying the file:

/usr/local/newaliases

(Alternately, type m-x compile in Emacs after editing this file.)

[Note this command won't -necessarily- tell one whether the

mailinglists file is syntactically legal -- it might just silently

trash the mail system on all of the suns.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE.]

Special note: Make sure all final mailing addresses have a host

name appended to them. If they don't, sendmail will attach the

Yellow Pages domain name on as the implied host name, which is

incorrect. Thus, if you receive your mail on wheaties, and your

username is johnq, use "johnq@wh" as your address. It

will cause major lossage to just use "johnq". One other point to

keep in mind is that any hosts outside of the "ai.mit.edu"

domain must have fully qualified host names. Thus, "xx" is not a

legal host name. Instead, you must use "xx.lcs.mit.edu".

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE

Special note about large lists:

It seems from empirical observation that any list defined IN THIS

FILE with more than fifty (50) recipients will cause newaliases to

say "entry too large" when it's run. It doesn't tell you -which-

list is too big, unfortunately, but if you've only been editing

one, you have some clue. Adding the fifty-first recipient to the

list will cause this error. The workaround is to use:include

files as described elsewhere, which seem to have much larger or

infinite numbers of recipients allowed. [The actual problem is

that this file is stored in dbm(3) format for use by sendmail.

This format limits the length of each alias to the internal block

size (1K).]

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE

Special note about comments:

Unlike OZ's MMAILR, you -CANNOT- stick a comment at the end of a

line by simply prefacing it with a "#". The mailer (or newaliases)

will think that you mean an address which just so happens to have

a "#" in it, rather than interpreting it as a comment. This means,

essentially, that you cannot stick comments on the same line as

any code. This also probably means that you cannot stick a comment

in the middle of a list definition (even on a line by itself) and

expect the rest of the list to be properly processed.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE

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FIGURE 1. Excerpts From A sendmail alias file