I have installed the vacation program which creates a .forward pipe to itself in the user directory. Sendmail 8.9.3-15 issues the following message: "550 /home/feral/.forward: line 1: "|vacation feral"... Address feral is unsafe for mailing to programs" The sendmail.org faq specifically states that: "In order for people to be able to run a program from their .forward file, version 8 sendmail insists that their shell (that is, the shell listed for that user in the passwd entry) be a "valid" shell, meaning a shell listed in /etc/shells. If /etc/shells does not exist, a default list is used, typically consisting of /bin/sh and /bin/csh." Bash is in /etc/shells and it still doesnt work. I have not yet tried to see if procmail works or examined the src rpm for sendmail. In simple translation, this should work but does not. The original vacation program was created by Eric Allman and I cant see why sendmail should be hostile to it. I have both used a contrib rpm for vacation and compiled a from a tar file. I am left with sendmail as being the culprit. Assistance would be appreciated before I have to go code diving.
I change the permissions on the .forward to go-w and now I get a core dump with mailer died with a signal 213. So now I am not completely sure that this a sendmail problem. I suppose I should submit another bug report on the vacation rpm if that is possible. Henri
Rebuilt the sendmail.cf file to include the smrsh FEATURE and now I get a sh: vacation not available for sendmail programs 554 "|vacation user"... Service unavailable
From /usr/lib/sendmail-cf/README: confUNSAFE_GROUP_WRITES UnsafeGroupWrites [False] If set, group-writable :include: and .forward files are considered "unsafe", that is, programs and files cannot be directly referenced from such files. World-writable files are always considered unsafe. You need tochange the default config if you want to change this behavior. I suggest you take a look at the said file for things you need to tweak. I am not sure about the vacation rpm you are using, if it is correct or not...