Thanks for all the help.
For some reason my question did not get posted for
several days, in the meantime I had figured out how
to deal with the problem (it may not be pretty but
it works!). Apparently, there was a difference between
Sun's sendmail 5.x and the new 8.6.4 sendmail in how they
handle the conversion from upper to lower case. 5.x folds
in the case for comparision but preserved it for everything
else, hence mail to users with capitals in their names worked.
8.6.4 simply converts the name to lowercase immediately and then
only works with the converted name (this meant that aliases
didn't solve the problem as suggested by one response). After
looking for an hour through the new sendmail book I discovered
that using the "u" flag in the Mlocal line would preserve
uppercase. However, there's a weird bug in the version of
procmail that we're using that would then drop the mail
in the file "/var/spool/mail/+" - not at all what was desired.
In addition, other mail started bouncing - apparently not having
the case preserved was a "feature not a bug" - people sending
mail (that had worked previously) with Capitals in the address
to users who really were all lowercase was now bouncing all
over the world. Really, sendmail is *such* fun :-). Anyway,
the final decision was that this was just too much hassle for
a relatively few "minor" users and so I set up redundant
all lowercase accounts for those users and the problem was
"solved".
After my question was posted I received many responses that said
only lowercase chars are valid in login names (see the passwd(5)
man page), and a couple that pointed me to the sendmail
mailing list:
Send questions to
sendmail-r8@CS.Berkeley.EDU (BSD sendmail mailing list)
Send subscribe requests to
sendmail-r8-request@CS.Berkeley.EDU (BSD sendmail mailing list)
where this problem has been discussed recently.
Overall, the general response was that although you could make
sendmail 8.6.4 work with the uppercase names other things might
break (i.e. procmail) and so the best bet was to "just say
no".
Thanks to all who responded:
ebumfr@EBU.ericsson.se (Mike Rembis 66520)
Ian MacPhedran <Ian_MacPhedran@engr.usask.ca>
Richard Elling <Richard.Elling@Eng.Auburn.EDU>
glenn@uniq.com.au (Glenn Satchell - Uniq Professional Services)
pallas@oclc.org (George Pallas)
Poul.Sorensen@nilu.no (Poul Henning Sorensen)
katzung@il.us.swissbank.com (Brian Katzung)
Peter.Samuel@nms.otc.com.au (Peter Samuel)
rob@hasler.ascom.ch (Robert Davies)
anthony baxter <anthony@aaii.oz.au>
Miroslaw Nazaruk <M.Nazaruk@appli.mimuw.edu.pl>
Susan.
<original question enclosed below>
> Subject: sendmail 8.6.4 question
>
>
> (If there's another list where this question is more appropriate
> please send me a pointer to the list)
>
> Help! I installed sendmail 8.6.4 on my network of Suns and now
> any mail sent to any of my users that have 1 or more capital
> letters in their login name (for example: Tom) bounces with an
> "user unknown" error. The accounts are valid accounts in all other
> ways (i.e. finger ~Tom, cd ~Tom, etc all work), and these accounts
> have been around for years with no mail problems. Any suggestions,
> pointers would be greatly appreciated!
>
> Thanks,
> Susan Coghlan
> Center for Nonlinear Studies
> LANL
> Los Alamos, NM 87545
> smc@cnls.lanl.gov
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:08:30 CDT