Enabling message tracking breaks mail delivery when using exim's sendmail

[dhke]

When

• message tracking is enabled for a list under "Bounce Management" and
• when sendmail is provided by exim

not messages get delivered to list subscribers. For a user and a list manager, this error is silent.

It would be nice if message tracking worked with exim or there was an option to disable it from the list management interface.

Version

6.2.66

Installation method

Ubuntu deb

Expected behavior

Mails to list subscribers should be delivered with message tracking enabled.

Actual behavior

Mails get submitted to exim-sendmail, but not delivered because of command line options.

Steps to reproduce

1. Have a machine with sendmail provided by exim
2. Configure message tracking for a mailing list
3. Send mail to mailing list, watch the sendmail gets called (from logs)
4. See that messages get suppressed

Additional information

The issue is in Sympa/Mailer.pm.

When message tracking is enabled, sendmail gets passed the command line flags -N success,delay,failure -V <envid>

For postfix-sendmail, this sets an envelope id for DSN tracking and enables delivery status notifications for successful deliveries instead of the usual delay, failure.

For exim

• -N is a debugging option, that suppresses mail delivery.
• -V makes exim print version information.

Setting message tracking for a list thus essentially disables mail delivery when using exim as the sendmail provider and there does not seem to be an option to disable the feature globally so that it is not available to list owners.

[ikedas]

You are right. Currently the tracking feature supports Sendmail and Postfix. The sendmail utilities bundled in the others, Exim, OpenSMTPD and probably more, do not provide options to enable tracking.

[ikedas]

So this is not a bug of Sympa.
The documentation doesn't say anything about a requirement for Sendmail or Postfix. After adding such a note, I'd like to close this issue. @dhke , do you agree?

[ikedas]

One more thing I forgot to mention.

If your MTA is Exim, I think you can enable tracking by setting the dsn_advertise_hosts option and using smtpc instead of sendmail.

[dhke]

So this is not a bug of Sympa. The documentation doesn't say anything about a requirement for Sendmail or Postfix. After adding such a note, I'd like to close this issue. @dhke , do you agree?

That would be nice. Currently it's a silent breakage and one that can be accidentally triggered by a list owner.

If I understand this correctly, setting

tracking privileged_owner hidden

in edit_list.conf is probably a suggestion for those using exim.