E line
Send errors to V8.6 and earlier
Notification of errors often requires special handling
by sendmail. When mail to a
mailing list fails, for example,
sendmail looks for the owner
of that list. If it finds one, the owner, not the
sender, receives notification of the error. To
differentiate error notification addresses from
ordinary sender and recipient addresses, pre-V8.7
sendmail stored error
addresses separately in the qf
file, one per E
line. Beginning with
V8.7, this E
line
is no longer used. Instead,
sendmail uses the S
line.
The form of the E
line in the qf
file looks like this:
Eaddr ← V8.6 and earlier
The E
must begin
the line. One or more addresses can be entered on
that same line. Whitespace and commas can surround
the individual addresses. Note, however, that
sendmail places only a single
address on each E
line. There can be multiple E
lines. Each is processed in
turn.
Each line is fully processed as it is read. That is, the line is scanned for multiple addresses. Each address that is found is alias-expanded. Each resulting new address is processed by rule sets 3 and 0 to resolve a delivery agent for each.
If an alias expands to a program or a file (text that
begins with a /
or |
character),
that text is sent out in the delivered message’s
Errors-To
: line
in that form. This can cause confusion when the
message is later processed and bounced at the
receiving site.
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