Sendmail, 3rd Edition

Name

EX_CONFIG

Synopsis

The EX_CONFIG exit value (the value 78) means that a fatal configuration problem was found, but this does not necessarily mean that the problem was found while reading the configuration file. Failure of a delivery agent to function correctly can lead to this kind of failure:

• During delivery, when a rule set 0 selection of a delivery agent fails to specify a host with the $@ part (Section 19.5), the following error is logged and the fork(2)'d child exits with EX_CONFIG:

  null hostname for mailer

• During delivery, when $u appears in the argument list for an SMTP delivery agent (See this section), sendmail logs the following error and the fork(2)'d child exits with EX_CONFIG:

  non-clever IPC

• During delivery, when an attempt is made to use an SMTP delivery agent with a version of sendmail that was compiled without SMTP support (SMTP), sendmail logs the following error and the fork(2)'d child exits with EX_CONFIG:

  deliver: need SMTP compiled to use clever mailer

Some apparent DNS errors are really configuration problems. In the following error, hostB is an MX record that points back to your host. The problem is that your host doesn’t know that it should be accepting mail for hostB. The solution is to add hostB to your local $=w class ($=w):

MX list for hostB points back to ourhost

When sendmail processes MX records, it skips any records of absurd length and logs the following message:

Host name ourhost too long

When sendmail looks up a CNAME record, that CNAME can point ...