Wed Dec 17 14:49:51 EST 1997 - (Greg A. Woods) woods@planix.com Happy Holidays! This release is a present to all you smail hackers just before I go off on two weeks of holidays. This BETA release of smail purports to fix the long standing bug that prevented delivery of a given message to identical mailboxes in virtual domains that were actually aliased or rewritten to new destinations. I haven't had any troubles with it yet, but since the way duplicate addresses are detected per-message you might want to consider this a "heads up!" notice and watch carefully for anything weird, especially with multiple address aliases, mailing lists, and the like. The warnings about spool file lock collisions and already processed spool files have been re-worded. These messages may be removed before the next release, but for now they're left in place to ensure that nothing was broken in the process. The default local user transport ("local") has the appendfile check_user attribute set to watch out for '/' in user-ids (note this should not adversely affect the "file" transport where '/' is usually a good thing). There are also yet another set of portability hacks, including some cleanup in the util subdirectory. This BETA release is running in production on a number of small ISP mail servers and gateways, as well as on my own network. Even better news is that it's been running on my primary server with Mark Moraes' debugging malloc library fully enabled since the 3.2.0.100 beta and there have been no buffer overwrites or writes to freed memory, or other mishaps that Mark's library detects. This doesn't mean there might not still be the odd off-by-one error, since smail generally allocates an extra sizeof(ALIGNED_TYPE) bytes on every malloc().... I've been wondering if this is necessary, or indeed if it ever was necessary. I'll try turning it off on a couple of different kinds of platforms before the next release just to see what happens. My general attitude would be that if some platform exists where this is necessary with the default system malloc() then you should find a new malloc() library -- lots exist. See the CHANGES file for further information. Note that the anti-relay feature is still not yet compatible with UUCP gateways (this is also mentioned by a warning note in the CHANGES file). The README still notes the official FTP site as UUNET, but of course if you look there you'll find they've been out of disk space for a number of months and have been unable to mirror anything at all. At the moment Planix has adequate bandwidth to offer full access to the Smail archive. Note though that our FTP server is also a personal workstation and further that it tracks NetBSD-current rather closely, so it may not be available 100% of the time. As always the ToDo and PROJECTS files list a growing number of things that various people think should be worked on. Patches that eliminate items from these files are always welcome! If you'd like to work on any of the bigger projects just send a note to and let us know so we can help co-ordinate and possibly give you access to the CVS repository. See the README and the file Smail3-devel for more information. Remember to use the smailbug utility to submit patches, change requests, bug reports and other stuff that needs to be recorded so it won't get lost or forgotten! (There's now a symlink installed in the smail_bin_dir to make it easier to access this script, and there's a new manual page for it too.)