Gnus ignores exit value of `sendmail-program'
I recently updated my TMDA (http://tmda.sourceforge.net/)
installation. Due to changes in TMDA and an ancient Exim
misconfiguration, Exim thought TMDA was attempting an illegal relay,
refused the connection, and the messages got dropped on the floor.
Nothing hugely important---but by the time I realized that they
weren't being sent out, I was doing usenet and Gnus had recycled all
the buffers. :-(
I accused TMDA:
> The big problem is that with the outgoing mail now going to
> port 25, somehow all my outgoing mail went to a bit bucket.
> For some reason, exim decided that mail sent via TMDA was
> coming from an external site and refused to relay. The
> messages were dropped on the floor, with no logs or copies kept
> by TMDA AFAICS. That looks like TMDA's bad to me.
And the TMDA maintainer replied:
tmda> Nope, that's a bug in Gnus, which someone really needs to
tmda> report. If `sendmail-program' exits non-zero, Gnus silently
tmda> fails instead of stopping, and displaying the error. To see
tmda> how gross this error is, create an empty file
tmda> (/tmp/emptyfile), chmod 755, and in your .gnus:
tmda> (setq sendmail-program "/tmp/emptyfile")
tmda> Then try sending some messages and watch them happily hit
tmda> the bit-bucket.
tmda> Most other MUAs handle this situation correctly (VM, Pine,
tmda> mutt, mailx, etc.).
So I'm reporting it.
--
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things. I don't
have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember. Scott Gilbert c.l.py