Hi, I'd like to know how difficult it might be to change the free (human
readable) text portion of a delivery status notification message that
Sendmail sends out.

I've got a few users that can not / will not read things like:


**********************************************
** THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY **
** YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE **
**********************************************

The original message was received at ...

So, I'm considering playing the game of trying to make the message more
'end user' friendly. I know, I know, I'm fighting an uphill battle, but
its one that I am being requested to attempt to fight.

I'm not wanting to change the (MIME) structure of the DSN, just the
human readable portion there in.

I figured before I went digging through source code I'd ask to see if
any one here knew how to go about doing this.

Sendmail 8.13.8 is what I'll be attempting this with.



Grant. . . .

In article
<mailman.86.1169652220.28999.comp.mail.sendmail@ma illists.riverviewtech.net>
Grant Taylor <gtaylor@riverviewtech.net> writes:
>Hi, I'd like to know how difficult it might be to change the free (human
>readable) text portion of a delivery status notification message that
>Sendmail sends out.
>
>I've got a few users that can not / will not read things like:
>
>
> **********************************************
> ** THIS IS A WARNING MESSAGE ONLY **
> ** YOU DO NOT NEED TO RESEND YOUR MESSAGE **
> **********************************************
>
>The original message was received at ...
[snip]
>I figured before I went digging through source code I'd ask to see if
>any one here knew how to go about doing this.

Uh, even with zero knowledge of the sendmail source and a minimal
knowledge of C, it would be faster to find the answer to your question
with the use of 'grep' and 'less' than to post a message to Usenet...:-)

--Per Hedeland
per@hedeland.org

Per Hedeland wrote:
> Uh, even with zero knowledge of the sendmail source and a minimal
> knowledge of C, it would be faster to find the answer to your question
> with the use of 'grep' and 'less' than to post a message to Usenet...:-)

*nod*

That is exactly what I was going to do (well, fgrep verses grep).
However, I thought that there might be one or more Sendmail developers
lingering in here. Or, this is not that unheard of it is possible that
someone else has done it.

However, it does not look like that is the case. So, I'll do my playing
and document what I find here for archival purposes.



Grant. . . .

In article
<mailman.98.1169744956.28999.comp.mail.sendmail@ma illists.riverviewtech.net>
Grant Taylor <gtaylor@riverviewtech.net> writes:
>Per Hedeland wrote:
>> Uh, even with zero knowledge of the sendmail source and a minimal
>> knowledge of C, it would be faster to find the answer to your question
>> with the use of 'grep' and 'less' than to post a message to Usenet...:-)
>
>*nod*
>
>That is exactly what I was going to do (well, fgrep verses grep).

But instead of the 30-second exercise that would tell you all you need
to know about this (or alternatively, though not the case here, would
tell you that it's something worth asking about), you post not one but
two messages about it to the group.:-) (And for this and almost all
other purposes except some advanced scripting, fgrep is just one more
character to type.)

>However, I thought that there might be one or more Sendmail developers
>lingering in here. Or, this is not that unheard of it is possible that
>someone else has done it.

Well, I think he is still lingering, but couldn't be bothered to
answer... Really, I think you'll understand what I'm talking about after
those 30 seconds with the source. It would be one thing if you had asked
"Is it possible to change this without modifying the source?", but you
seemed to know that the answer to that was "No", and was prepared to do
the source modification - and *in this particular case*, asking "How?"
without even looking at the source turns out to be pretty silly.:-)

--Per Hedeland
per@hedeland.org