cronie 1.7.0 introduced an undocumented change that will break many mail setups. By default, it will pass "-f '<>'" to sendmail in order to configure an empty envelope from. The motivation was to avoid autoresponders in response to cron mails. This is a bug on multiple levels. Using "-f '<>'" for an empty envelope from header appears to work in postfix setups (though apparently not all of them), but according to my tests it does not work in courier and exim. (It likely also won't work on some other MTAs.) The effect is that cron mails won't be sent after an update to 1.7.0 or 1.7.1. Also, empty envelope from headers (so-called "null reverse-path") are reserved for special mails, e.g. mail delivery notifications, and setting a null reverse-path for anything else is against RFC recommendations ( https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5321#section-4.5.5 ). Apparently, the upstream author got some feedback that this breaks, and reverted the change after the 1.7.0 release. But shortly after that, he changed it back again in a slightly different way with the same effect. So 1.7.1 is still broken. Unfortunately, I reported this upstream, and upstream does not appear to be interested in fixing this: https://github.com/cronie-crond/cronie/issues/170 I am not sure how to best handle this from Gentoo's side. I am mainly reporting it here so other people facing the same problem can find this bug and an explanation. I am personally now using an 1.7.1 ebuild with a patch to revert the bad commit: https://github.com/cronie-crond/cronie/commit/c640f4f39e5c20995e960e4b954cd0574a96c028
It's fine with me if you add a new revision with that revert. It's going to lead to a lot of confused people without it, I think.
Looks like upstream have decided to revert it themselves so I'll pull that in now.
The bug has been closed via the following commit(s): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=c8d03c5fd70d4e1f0696ed140203f2475869ea7b commit c8d03c5fd70d4e1f0696ed140203f2475869ea7b Author: Sam James <sam@gentoo.org> AuthorDate: 2024-01-19 10:28:25 +0000 Commit: Sam James <sam@gentoo.org> CommitDate: 2024-01-19 10:28:35 +0000 sys-process/cronie: backport envelope revert Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/922477 Signed-off-by: Sam James <sam@gentoo.org> sys-process/cronie/cronie-1.7.1-r1.ebuild | 111 +++++++++++++++++++++ .../files/cronie-1.7.1-envelope-revert.patch | 59 +++++++++++ 2 files changed, 170 insertions(+)
