Re: Warning: sendmail macro "b"

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (May 26), Dan O'Brien said:
> I'm getting an occasional warning from the milter:
> May 23 07:18:00 sweep2 spamass-milter[2323]: Could not retrieve
> sendmail macro "b"!.  Please add it to confMILTER_MACROS_ENVRCPT for
> better spamassassin results
> So I look at my sendmail.mc and find that I have no
> confMILTER_MACROS_ENVRCPT.  So I go to the sendmail documentation and
> try to figure out what the defaults are.  (Actually, I got another cup
> of coffee somewhere in there -- it's before 8.)  The default macros
> passed to the milter after a RCPT TO: are {rcpt_mailer}, {rcpt_host},
> and {rcpt_addr}.  ('b' is apparently the current time?)
> Here's were I'm fuzzy (beyond where I'm expected to be before 8am,
> even accounting for inadequate coffee consumption):
> 1.  What's the correct syntax in sendmail mc for the addition of the
> 'b' macro?  I used the line below with apparent success:
>         define(`confMILTER_MACROS_ENVRCPT', `{rcpt_mailer},
> {rcpt_host}, {rcpt_addr}, {b}')dnl

The README in the spamass-milter source has this:

define(`confMILTER_MACROS_CONNECT',`t, b, j, _, {daemon_name}, {if_name}, 
{if_addr}')dnl
define(`confMILTER_MACROS_HELO',`s, {tls_version}, {cipher}, {cipher_bits}, 
{cert_subject}, {cert_issuer}')dnl
define(`confMILTER_MACROS_ENVRCPT',`r, v, Z')dnl

The different types are additive, so anything visible at connect time
is also visible later on.  I see the default values for
confMILTER_MACROS_ENVRCPT are missing, so I'll fix that in the next
release.  It'd be nice to be able to just say "Append 'b' to the
existing macro list", but I don't think m4 can do that.

> 2.  After I put the line in, I did a more thorough search of the logs
> and there are very few occurrences of the warning I'm reporting here.
>  Am I on a snipe hunt?  Is is possible that the warning is message
> related, rather than configuration related (where I'd expect to get
> the warning most of the time instead of occasionally)?

'b' is used to fetch the timestamp that gets put in the Received:
header, so it's used for every message.  It's not fatal, which is why
spamass-milter only warns once about it.  While you're editing your .mc
file you might as well add the rest of the macros, too.  spamass-milter
only warns about one missing macro at a time, so adding 'b' will just
make it warn about one of the other ones :)

-- 
        Dan Nelson
        address@hidden