mailwrapper behaviour if mailer.conf can't be opened
- Reply: Ed Maste : "Re: mailwrapper behaviour if mailer.conf can't be opened"
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Date: Thu, 18 Apr 2024 17:24:11 UTC
hello, i submitted this change request: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/pull/969 which was rejected for needing more discussion, so i'd like to discuss that. the current behaviour is that if mailwrapper cannot open mailer.conf for any reason, it calls back to _PATH_DEFAULTMTA. i think this behaviour is bad, because: - if the default MTA has not been configured, it may not be able to deliver mail - if the admin has configured a different MTA, mailwrapper should not fall back to a different MTA because of transient errors - this may hide mail delivery errors from applications by delivering the mail to the wrong MTA instead of returning a failure with my change, mailwrapper will fall back to _PATH_DEFAULTMTA if mailer.conf doesn't exist, which preserves mail functionality if the admin has deleted mailer.conf for some reason. but if mailer.conf can't be opened for any other reason, it will exit with EX_OSERR, returning an error to the application. this was previously discussed on the PR: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=25218 where the argument was made that it's better to make a 'last ditch' attempt to deliver mail if mailer.conf can't be opened. i disagree with this, for the reasons above, and in addition because modern systems generally do not rely on mail delivery to report serious errors -- they are monitored by an external NMS.