sendmail, user catchalls, and other MTA hate

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From: Zach White
Subject: sendmail, user catchalls, and other MTA hate
Date: 01:14 on 26 May 2006
So I'm rebuilding a machine that at various times over the years has run 
qmail and courier. Both of those pieces of software have a really nice 
feature where you can email user-<something>@domain, and if 
user-<something> doesn't exist on the machine the mail will get delivered 
to user. In fact, I'm pretty sure that qmail originated this feature, but 
I'm too hateful right now to verify that.

So in rebuilding this machine, I decide that rather than install a 
different MTA, I'll go with sendmail, which comes with the machine. 
Contrary to past experience, sendmail really isn't as hateful as I was 
prepared for it to be. Except when it comes to making sure that my 
623,612 subscriptions that use zwhite-<listname> still work without 
specifying each one in either aliases or virtusertable. 

Nothing in the documentation about how to do that. Nothing in the FAQ.  
Nothing I can find using google. It doesn't help that google ignores the 
+ and - characters in searches, either.

According to a friend who is a sendmail ninja, I'll have to change the 
source. Good thing that + isn't used very often in code, isn't it?

root:/usr/src/gnu/usr.sbin/sendmail:35# grep -r '+' . | wc -l
    4336

HATE HATE HATE

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