Mail with RCPT TO:<> delivers to root

[Carl Houseman]

HP-UX 11.11

An application running under HP-UX generates mail and had been delivering to an external mail relay. Recently this was changed to use localhost as the relay. Some messages are being sent with an empty To: field and the SMTP dialog amounts to:

MAIL FROM:
RCPT TO:<>
RCPT TO:

So these messages are delivered to the root mailbox as well as the validrecipient@domain.com.

We are looking into preventing the application from sending the empty recipient, but meanwhile...

Is there any sendmail.cf parameter I can change to prevent the delivery of such messages to the root mailbox, while continuing to deliver to the other recipients?

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Don't you just change the postmaster entry in the /etc/mail/aliases file and regenerate the aliases database by running 'newaliases'?

Never had to do it myself, but that would make sense to me.

HTH

Duncan

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

I have done the previous posts solution and if my pea brain molecules still work, this solution is tested and will suceed.

SEP

[Carl Houseman]

OK, so you want me to do something with the postmaster entry in /etc/aliases, but exactly what is not clear. I tried

postmaster : /dev/null

and

#postmaster : /dev/null

and mail still showed up in the root mailbox. Yes, I ran /usr/sbin/newaliases after each change.

[Carl Houseman]

BTW, I tested with a several other smtp servers and they provided the desired behavior I would like to see here:

rcpt to:<>
501 5.5.4 Invalid Address

rcpt to:<>
553 5.0.0 <>... User address required

rcpt to:<>
501 <>: missing or malformed local part

The last one above was a sendmail server, so I gather this must be possible.

[Carl Houseman]

It's looking like sendmail 8.9.3 simply doesn't have the means to reject such messages, and I need to upgrade it to 8.12.x or later. I've found the 8.13 "special release upgrade" in the software depot and downloaded it.

If anyone knows an alternative not requiring sendmail upgrade, please advise.