Mon Feb 5 20:15:03 EST 2001 - (Greg A. Woods) woods@planix.com Just ten days of short of a year from the last release! ;-) But the wait should hopefully be worth it in this case! This BETA release of Smail integrates the TCP Wrappers support directly into Smail thus providing far superior error handling and logging for both hosts experiencing DNS troubles, as well as for administratively prohibited hosts (either directly or via RBLs). Specific error messages can even be specified for admin-denied hosts. Please read the re-written entries under "Security" in the CHANGES file, and of course the newly documented variables in the smailconf(5) manual page. Smail will now totally ignore TCP Wrappers -- it's API was... lacking. There have also been some very important changes to better prevent denial-of-service styles of attacks. IMPORTANT: note that wildcard IP network numbers are no longer supported and now CIDR-style network specifications are permitted. See the new section "IP and IP Network Number Representation" in the smail(5) manual page. Also of note are fixes to the way the "tryagain" attribute is handled for various pathalias-like routers. This should help fix various problems with things like alias files going temporarlily missing without Smail noticing and thus causing e-mail to fall through the cracks. I'm not 100% sure the handling of files specified in the "rewrite" file will be correct yet, and probably not, but do not dispair -- I'm working on it and it's nothing worse than you've put up with in previous releases. The SMTP transport logic has had important and significant fixes. SMTP retry files are now named after the IP address of the specific server so that domains with many A records won't stall after one host exhibits problems. Runq has been made more efficient. There are some more minor fixes for various portability issues. The 'checkerr' utility script now cleans up old retry files too. There's a new utility script called 'unfreezemail' which will hopefully safely help retry messages from the error queue after whatever caused them to get there has been corrected. Smail will restart itself on most systems now if /etc/resolv.conf is changed. Note that on FreeBSD-3.4 there is not normally a libresolv library so you may have to remove the '-lresolv' from LDFLAGS in conf/os/bsd4.4. Note also that on the most modern of Linux systems (with glibc 2.0?) it may be necessary to add '-DUSE_SIGINTERRUPT -D_BSD_SOURCE' in order to allow the daemon wakeup alarm to interrupt a waiting accept() call. There are probably a bunch of other new or different things I've missed -- read the diffs if you're really interested. Some day I'll try to figure out how to get CVS to spit out exactly the right change log entries for a release but until now the diff's is all there is! :-) 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.)