Sendmail question with regards to MailScanner

[Todd Williams]

Hello,

I've searched and not turned up a whole lot of useful help regarding this
question, but perhaps someone else has seen what I'm seeing.

If an internal user (accidentally?) writes an e-mail to a bogus or
unreachable domain name  (or in the case an internet connection is down),
when sendmail 8.11.6 (with the appropriate command line options for
queueonly and a queue directory of /var/spool/mqueue.inbox) takes the
message, it attempts to munge on the message (seemingly ignoring the
queueonly option), and because it sees the message as a "deferred" message,
dumps the message directly into the /var/spool/mqueue directory, which
effectively bypasses the MailScanner altogether.  While this may be a
non-issue, I just wanted to see if others have seen this same behaviour.

I thought it odd that even when handed the
"-ODeliveryMode=q -OQueueDirectory=/var/spool/mqueue.inbox" options, in the
case of a deferred message, sendmail bypasses it's command line parameters
and follows the sendmail.cf directive (?) to send it to the default queue
directory.  I even tried playing with the "-OErrorMode=q" option as well,
setting it to "queue only" and the deferred messages still end up in the
default /var/spool/mqueue directory the same as before.  Everything else
under normal conditions works fine.  I suspect we could change the queueonly
sendmail process to use a different sendmail.cf configuration file which
specifies the QueueDirectory as the incoming MailScanner queue directory to
force it through the MailScanner irregardless, but I was trying to avoid
convoluting things more than necessary.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Todd