2 sendmail glitches

[Matt Harrington <matteo@dnai.com>]

 Glitch 1:
 ---------
 With sendmail 8.9.3 (and earlier versions) I have the following
 problem:  my mail server and NFS server are 2 different machines.  All
 accounts have home directories on the NFS server and the mail server
 mounts filesystems when needed.  When a disk dies on the NFS server
 email does not get delivered to accounts which were on the dead disk.
 At first I thought this was because sendmail tried to mount the disk
 looking for a .forward file, so I configured sendmail to look in
 /usr/local/etc/forwards on the mail server with this option:
 
 O ForwardPath=/usr/local/etc/forwards/$u.forward
 
 What's strange is that it doesn't appear (from "df") that the mail
 server is trying to mount the dead disk, but mail isn't delivered to
the
 affected accounts.
 
 I am doing all of this so that users can still get mail via POP even
 when their home directory is unavailable.  Any ideas on why mail
doesn't
 get delivered?
 
 Glitch 2:
 ---------
 
 I have several mailing lists on the mail server.  When sendmail can't
 deliver a message to all accounts (because of Glitch 1 above), the
 message goes back into the queue.  The problem is that sendmail
rewrites
 the recipient list to include the problem accounts >and< a random
number
 of accounts which already received the message.  The effect is that
 certain users get hundreds of copies of mail from the mailing lists.
 This appears to be a bug in sendmail.  Any ideas on how to get sendmail
 to rewrite the recipient list properly?
 
 Matt Harrington
 UCSF
 415-476-4628
 
 P.S.  I know that sendmail doesn't actually deliver the mail once it
has
 reached its destination.  I don't know how /bin/mail works into the
 picture.