SPUG: sendmail from Perl (quick newbie question)

dancerboy dancerboy at strangelight.com
Wed Feb 13 15:29:00 CST 2002


Well, I sort of figured out what my problem was, and since it seems 
like it might be a common "gotcha", I figured I'd share:

The problem appears to be that all three of my test addresses were 
really aliases for the same address (using the catch-all email 
forwarding of my strangelight.com domain).  Somewhere on its route 
from the server where the CGI is hosted to where strangelight.com is 
hosted (no, they're not the same machine, nor even the same subnet) 
SMTP was being overly clever and deciding that since all the 
recipient aliases resolved to the same real address, there was no 
need to deliver more than one copy.  The strange thing is that when I 
do exactly the same thing from my normal email client, i.e. send an 
email to multiple recipients @strangelight.com, I get multiple copies 
just as I would expect.  Why sending from a CGI script via sendmail 
should be different from sending from my desktop machine via Eudora 
is beyond me.

Be that as it may, when I used multiple test addresses that really 
did send to different POP accounts, the script worked as expected -- 
and since the real addresses will be on different machines, this 
should work fine.

I still find this behaviour of sendmail very odd, though...

-jason


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