In article <1158844382.708423.297310@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups .com>
"gymshoes" <jschueler@tqis.com> writes:
>
>As soon as the Recipient is specified in the SMTP dialog, sendmail must
>run through Ruleset 0 to determine by the mailer whether the w option
>is invoked. If the fork and exec operations also occur at this point,
>then a delivery agent exit code could trigger an RFC 821 message... if
>it exits immediately.

Well, it doesn't happen that way - sendmail doesn't invoke the delivery
agent until the SMTP transaction has been completed. Doing otherwise
would require a more sophisticated interface than the current
"specification" (i.e. recipients on commandline, message on stdin, give
exit code when delivery completed). E.g. the client may not complete (or
even arrive at) the DATA phase, in which case no message must be
delivered - but there is no way for sendmail to tell the delivery agent
to abort. (There are other issues too, like wanting to take advantage of
the delivery agent's capability to deliver to multiple recipients in one
go.)

Of course a "more sophisticated interface" does exist, i.e. LMTP, and
sendmail does support it - but using it doesn't actually change any of
the above.

>Your response suggests otherwise. Is it worth the effort for me to
>test my theory?

Uh, if your theory is that sendmail invokes the delivery agent during
the SMTP dialogue, no, it's not worth the effort to test that, since it
isn't true.:-) Of course you don't need to take my word for that, but
then there's no point in asking for my opinion on the effort either.:-)

--Per Hedeland
per@hedeland.org