[svlug] mail relaying, jitterbug and me, The Final Chapter

[Robert Hajime Lanning]

---- As written by josh:
> 
> I thought I'd tell everyone that I fixed it, and go through how I did
> it, because I know everyone is just *dying* to know.
> 
> Long story made relatively short:
> 
> I had to install updated sendmail and sendmail-cf packages, along with
> getting a copy of rbl.m4 from somewhere or other on the web.  I
> regenerated the sendmail.cf file following the excellent instructions here:
> http://www.rocketry.org/~tim/geek_stuff/sendmail.php, being very
> careful to follow the instructions exactly.  The one exception is
> the line sendmail.mc file:
>   FEATURE(access_db, `hash /etc/mail/access')dnl
> has to be changed to:
>   FEATURE(access_db, `hash -T<TMPF> /etc/mail/access')dnl
> 
> Why?  What does -T<TMPF> do?  I have no idea.
> 
> Anyway.  Thanks to everyone who gave advice.  In closing, I'd like to
> say that the idea of these weirdo machine-generated, nonreadable
> config files is totally stupid and that I hope I never have to deal with
> this ever again as long as I live, and that I'd like to scratch the face of
> the person who thought of it in the first place.
> 
> - josh

I used to write the sendmail.cf by hand.  It is actualy quite simple.  The
problem is that it is low level. (kindof like assembly)

Very much like regular expressions (of the substitute variety, with back
references.)

R[format of address to match] <tab> [format to output] <tab> [comment]

You have to read it like source code.  With conditionals, loops, subroutines,
variables and the likes.

It actualy reminds me of how Mozilla has been rewritten to run.  The bulk
of the GUI code is scripts, just a new environment to interpret the scripts.

Of course, I come from the programming side of systems, so it was easy to
pickup, what was basicaly, another scripting language syntax.

I still write my own rules and include them via "HACK(`mycode')dnl".

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