AIX sendmail problem

[Craig_Everhart at TRANSARC.COM]

This isn't just an AIX sendmail problem, but a sendmail problem for all
platforms.  (This is from memory.)

The code in sendmail that prints messages like this ("450 User at
lunch") is real convoluted.  Essentially, if a message starts with three
digits, this code will assume that these three digits are the SMTP
message code, and will separate them out, rather than finding the
message code in some other parameter or global variable.  As to the
fourth character, I'd guess that it's allowed to be space or hyphen, but
will get clobbered to space if the caller was so unwise as not to have
allowed that.

Thus, when sendmail starts up, it would ordinarily print its ``220
my.domain.name'' message, but if ``my.domain.name'' really starts with
three digits as 777sup1.ca.boeing.com does, the greet message will be
printed with a 777 message code.

Of course, in SMTP-land, such a code would indicate something truly
weird going on.

The only solutions I can think of involve heavy sendmail hacks, running
something besides sendmail as an SMTP server, or changing the host name
involved so it doesn't start with three digits.

		Craig