Sun Aug 2 15:36:58 EDT 1998 - (Greg A. Woods) woods@planix.com Wow! It's been a long long time since the last beta, eh? ;-) This BETA release of smail fixes a number of bugs in major changes from the last few betas, including the problem of errors from pipe delivery on some hosts, and the parsing of RFC 822 route addresses, mixed RFC and UUCP or '%'-hack address forms, rewrite router problems, Security has been tightened up on commands that might be executed remotely, such as the rmail(1) and rsmtp(1) interfaces. The HELO verification was also missing "123.1.1.234" forms (i.e. missing []). In fixing the pipe delivery problem there has been an implementation change in the way that variables are expanded in the pipe command line. If the command line starts with a '$' then it will be expanded before being broken into command-line arguments. On machines where exec(2) et al support '#! /interpreter/path' this allows simple use of "cmd=$user" where aliases point at commands, for example, and helps better preserve the return code from the command. Child process creation has also been made more robust and given better error reporting. An as-yet undocumented ${eval: attribute has been added for variable expansions. If this proves useful to people I'll document it properly. Otherwise it may disappear until after the 3.2 release. This new feature was added as one of the possible ways of fixing pipe delivery problems. The router's "gateway" statement has been fixed (seemingly broken since about 3.2.0.93). The '-vNN' option is now passed to mkaliases(1) to aid in debugging it too. More fixes and updates have been made to the documentation. There are also yet another set of portability hacks, including some more cleanup in the util subdirectory, some new notes about Solaris 2.6 and better support for OpenBSD. A NetBSD "pkgsrc" package is in preparation and fixes from the FreeBSD "ports" package have been incorporated. The default GRADES definition has been made more compatible with modern Sendmail defaults. See the CHANGES file for further information. BTW, I'm working on a patch to TCP Wrappers that will allow generic implementation of RBL-style connection filtering (there's now also an RBL-like map listing many ISP dial-up ports). This will make it trivial to turn on any RBL-like map if Smail has TCP Wrapper support already turned on. Note that the anti-relay feature is still not yet compatible with UUCP gateways (this is also mentioned by a warning note in the CHANGES file). UUNET's FTP mirror of smail is seemingly back in production. As always the ToDo and PROJECTS files list a growing number of things that various people think should be worked on. Patches that eliminate items from these files are always welcome! If you'd like to work on any of the bigger projects just send a note to and let us know so we can help co-ordinate and possibly give you access to the CVS repository. See the README and the file Smail3-devel for more information. Remember to use the smailbug utility to submit patches, change requests, bug reports and other stuff that needs to be recorded so it won't get lost or forgotten! (There's now a symlink installed in the smail_bin_dir to make it easier to access this script, and there's a new manual page for it too.)