Re: send mail to multiple recipients

["Philip A. Prindeville" <philipp@mirapoint.com>]

"S.T. Wong" wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I'm using OpenLDAP 1.2.3 and sendmail 8.9.3 on Solaris 2.6.  We use
> mailacceptinggeneralid as the search criteria and returns maildrop as the
> destination.  When there're multiple matches in mailacceptingeneralid, and/or
> multi-valued maildrop is returned, the resulting recipient address will be a
> list of comma-separated maildrops of all entries found.

This is a Stanford-specific hack.  You would be better off using a schema
taken from a current internet-draft, like "mail", "mailhost", and
"mailRewritingAddress" attributes.  The "mailAlternateAddress" attribute
is also useful for taking a "nickname" and canonicalizing a name.  For an
"inetOrgPerson", you should never get multiple maildrops.  This is an error.

> I see something like this in sendmail log, e.g. :
>
> to=<address1@abc.com,address2@efg.com,address3@xyz.com>
>
> and the mail was delivered to xyz.com only which complaint about user unknown.

Yeah, only mailing lists (in this case, implemented as that abomination
called "aliases" in sendmail) are allowed to return multiple values, and
only when looked up at a particular time...  I can explain the details to
you off-line if you want.

> I'd like to know if it's correct behaviour for multiple matches/recipents.

Not when delivering to an individual, no.

> Besides, is it possible to return to sender for multiple matches with warning
> messages instead sending the mail ?

Sure.  Just use the #error mailer with the appropriate DSN code.

> Would anyone please help ?
>
> Thanks a lot.
> Regards,
> ST Wong (st-wong@cuhk.edu.hk)

-Philip