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Date:      Mon, 20 May 2002 10:51:54 -0500
From:      Damon Anton Permezel <dap@damon.com>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   4.6-* sendmail misfeatures
Message-ID:  <20020520105154.E962@damon.com>

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Since upgrading from 4.5 to 4.6-*, I have had problems exchanging
email with a correspondent at "austinenergy.com".  It shows up as:

	% echo hi | mail -v no.such.user@austinenergy.com
	austinenergy.com: Name server timeout
	no.such.user@austinenergy.com... Transient parse error -- message queued for future delivery
	no.such.user@austinenergy.com... queued

I have tracked this down to the fact that sendmail is using a IPv6-style
lookup request.  It is a "AAAA ?" rather than a "A ?" (in tcpdump-esque).

Further investigation dug up this manifesto in the sendmail README:

	When attempting to canonify a hostname, some broken name
	servers will return SERVFAIL (a temporary failure) on T_AAAA
	(IPv6) lookups.  If you want to excuse this behavior, include
	WorkAroundBrokenAAAA in ResolverOptions.  However, instead,
	we recommend catching the problem and reporting it to the
	name server administrator so we can rid the world of broken
	name servers.

So, in violation of the networking "be liberal in what you accept and
conservative in what you produce", sendmail in it's new form will have many
perplexed sysadmins spending lots of time tracking down these mysterious
failures.

I suggest that the version of sendmail configs shipped with FreeBSD
should default to having WorkAroundBrokenAAAA set by default.

-- 
--
Damon Permezel
dap@damon.com


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