Too many CNAMES encountered

[Jon Skelton]

I have a majordomo list with several hundred subscribers. One
subscriber had an address that Smail wouldn't send to due to the 'Too
many CNAMES encountered' error. Unfortunately, some other subscribers
with perfectly valid e-mail addresses didn't receive the mail either.
The /var/log/smail/logfile entries for the failed deliveries all looked
similar to this...

01/27/1999 16:11:56: [m105ewC-000UFab] Failed TO:us...@good.domain.com
ROUTER:sma
rt_host DIRECTOR:aliasinclude TRANSPORT:smtp ERROR:(ERR156) transport
smtp: 553
'<us...@bad.domain.com>' <us...@bad.domain.com> not matched: (ERR_177)
route
r inet_hosts: too many CNAMEs encountered in DNS for bad.domain.com
(maximum
permitted = 1)..

I verified via nslookup that the address I've replaced with
bad.domain.com does in fact have chained CNAMEs for the domain. I've
also verified the TO: addresses of several bounced e-mail as known good
addresses.

Here are a few more clarifying facts. All local addresses were
delivered properly AFAIK. All properly delivered messages did not
reference aliasinclude. They looked like so...

01/27/1999 16:09:30: [m105ewC-000UFab] Delivered VIA:smarthost.msri.org
TO:us...@another.good.domain.com ORIG-TO:announcements-outgoing
ROUTER:smart_host TRANSPORT:smtp

I don't understand two things. 1) Why did one bad address affect
multiple good addresses? 2) Why do the failed messages have
DIRECTOR:aliasinclude in the Smail/logfile entries?

Jon