Our current mail system here uses sendmail interfaced to X.500 to
deliver mail to unique usernames as well as CommonName variants, e.g.,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Christopher.S.Shenton @hq.nasa.gov
I'm working to replace this with qmail-ldap and missing one feature we
now have which our users and correspondents rely upon.
If you send mail to an ambiguous address, like "[EMAIL PROTECTED]",
the mail-X.500 gateway notices it gets multiple hits and replies with
a bounce message indicating likely targets:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: undeliverable mail
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 17:29:21 -0400 (EDT)
The following errors occurred when trying to deliver the attached mail:
smith: Ambiguous user. First 10 matches found:
Brian C Smith-1 Education Specialist
Jonathan H Smith-1 Senior Consultant
Eric P Smith-1 Program Scientist
Dennis Smith-1
Timothy Smith-1 Cmptg.Syst.Program Analyst 3 (Media)
Vickie Smith-1 Secretary
Mark Allen Smith-1 Criminal Investigator
Robert N Smith-1 HQ IFMP Manager
Barbara J Smith-1
Margaret Patricia Smith-1 Trip Coordinator to Administrator
When qmail-ldap finds an ambiguous address, it replies with a bounce
but doesn't provide any helpful information; you can't tell whether
there's no likely recipient or there are multiple likely recipients.
Below, I've intentionally created a near-duplicate entry with same
mailAlternateAddress -- similar to what our X.500 system might
encounter from ambiguous CommonNames:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: failure notice
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 29 Sep 2003 21:35:44 -0000
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at saddam.saic.hq.nasa.gov.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
[custombouncetext] Message bounced; contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Sorry, no mailbox here by that name. (#5.1.1)
--- Below this line is a copy of the message.
[...]
I'm not sure but I believe this is initiated in qldap-ldaplib.c in
qldap_lookup():
int qldap_lookup(searchinfo *search, char **attrs, userinfo *info,
extrainfo *extra)
/* searches a db entry as specified in search, and fills up info and extra with
* the coresponding db entries or NULL if not available.
* Returns 0 if a entry was found, 1 if more than one or no corresponding entry
* was found. On error it returns -1 and sets the appropriate qldap_errno. */
Later in the function:
/* count the results, we must have exactly one */
if ( (num_entries = ldap_count_entries(ld,msg)) != 1) {
log(64, "qldap_lookup: Too many (less) entries found (%i)\n",
num_entries);
if ( num_entries )
qldap_errno = LDAP_COUNT;
else
qldap_errno = LDAP_NOSUCH;
return -1;
}
So it doesn't distinguish between "not found" and "multiple found".
If I'm reading it right, this is called when trying to deliver mail by
qmail-lspawn.c in qldap_get():
/* do the search for the email address */
ret = qldap_lookup(&search, attrs, &info, extra);
if ( ret == 0 || i == 0 ) break; /* something found or nothing found */
I'm unlikely to get approval to deploy this system here unless I can
replicate the current functionality. Can anyone suggest how I might
be able to bounce with a "helpful" message for ambiguous usernames?
Many thanks.
