[cobalt-users] sendmail crash

["Kevin D" <kdlists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

This is the second time tragedy has struck sendmail on my Raq3i. A user
tried to send a 137kb attachment, which is well within the file size limit
set on my raq for attachments. The email was sent by Outlook Express 98,
under windows 98. It looks like every time Outlook tried to connect to
sendmail, the connection timed out, so the email stayed in the users outbox,
and thus the message was resent every 10 minutes or so. Well, the processes
that sendmail spawned to receive these messages never terminated. Thus,
there were about 15 sendmail child processes open, and sendmail was shut
down under "extreme load."

Well, I telnet'd in and cleaned up all the dead processes, and then
restarted sendmail. Of course, within 1/2 hour or so, outlook had pumped
enough instances of this message to almost crash sendmail again... so I had
to call the user up and have him delete the offending email from outlook.

Does anyone have any idea why a single attachment might make sendmail freak
out like this? I went to sendmail.org and found the following known bug:

* accept() problem on Linux.

  The accept() in sendmail daemon loop can return ETIMEDOUT.  An
  error is reported to syslog:

  Jun  9 17:14:12 hostname sendmail[207]: NOQUEUE: SYSERR(root):
   getrequests: accept: Connection timed out

  "Connection timed out" is not documented as a valid return from
  accept(2) and this was believed to be a bug in the Linux kernel.
  Later information from the Linux kernel group states that Linux
  2.0 kernels follow RFC1122 while sendmail follows the original BSD
  (now POSIX 1003.1g draft) specification.  The 2.1.X and later kernels
  will follow the POSIX draft.

However, the sample log entry above did not appear in my messages or
maillog. I also read about a problem sendmail as with the null (0x00)
characer (presumably because it uses C strings).

Has anyone else experienced similar issues? Are there any
patches/workarounds for this, or do I have to be constantly vigilant for
these evil little attachments?

Thanks,
Kevin