chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) (02/16/84)
I am seeing a growing problem with mailers munging return addresses,
and this is starting to get ridiculous. Right now, a good percentage of
the return addresses I see on things coming in to me are bad, with at
least one hop missing. A lot of the mail I get comes through
...!ihnp4!fortune, and when I reply to it, the fortune hop isn't there.
I don't know if this is fortune or ihnp4 or even some unknown gnome
upstream doing this (it doesn't seem to be our site) but it should probably
be looked into. Another one seems to be decvax, since I got a message the
other day with the address ...!orca!decvax!..., and when I mailed to
...!decvax!orca!... I got the poor message back because decvax seems to
have never heard of orca. *sigh* And so it goes...
Isn't technology wonderful? I'd appreciate it if the orca people could drop
me a line and let me know how to get ahold of them...
~And so it goes~
chuq
--
From the house at Pooh Corner: Chuq 'Nuke Wobegon' Von Rospach
{fortune,menlo70}!nsc!chuqui Have you hugged your Pooh today?
Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Piestein@fortune.UUCP (Mark Stein) (02/17/84)
I think one of the problems is how sendmail rewrites sender addresses for
uucp mail. The uucpproto/uucpm configuration supplied with sendmail (and
I suspect many sites are using this configuration) causes the local sitename
to be prepended to the address in the From header line. This works fine as
long as all intermediate sites do the same thing. But, when the mail
passes through a non-sendmail site (like fortune), this rewriting does not
occur and funny addresses are formed. And replies go awry. (This rewriting
is in addition to the normal UNIX from line at the beginning of the message.
As far as I can tell, this path will still be correct.)
I have noticed this behavior in mail I have received via cbosgd and ihnp4,
both running sendmail. We are in the process of bringing up sendmail at
fortune, and this issue is on my list of items to be resolved before we
actually cut over to it. Is there any standard which addresses this?
Mark Stein
{amd70,cbosgd,harpo,ihnp4,sri-unix}!fortune!steinper@erix.UUCP (Per Hedeland) (02/22/84)
<>
While RFC 886 is interesting (imagine, a standard for munging!), it doesn't
seem to give much help in the current situation.
I don't think the problem with the 'From:' lines is the fault of 4.2 sendmail,
but rather of the sites *not* running it, which don't understand the RFC 822
standard (or shouldn't we adopt it? hmmm...)
As you have noticed, these sites don't prepend their name to the contents of
the 'From:' line, rather they prepend the 'From ... remote from "site"' line
to the message, hopefully making at least the 'From ' line(s) in the message
you receive correct. (But be warned: sendmail, and 4.2 rmail, munges this line
too, so there are no guarantees...)
Granted that this situation will exist for a while, the real problem is:
Which line ('From:' or 'From ') does your mailer use for a reply? If your mail
system doesn't understand the 'From:' line, it certainly shouldn't use it for
replies! (E g 4.1 Mail uses 'From ', 4.2 Mail uses 'From:'.)
That leaves us poor 4.2 users (and others?) whose replies keep bouncing...
I can see two (maybe three) possible solutions:
1) Edit the message (e g deleting or distorting the 'From:' line) before
replying. (Ugly, quite impossible to present to the user community.)
2) Use the wonderful flexibility of sendmail, modifying the .cf file to
make it, at local delivery,
a) Drop the 'From:' line completely or
b) Turn it into something unrecognizeable ('Apparently-From:' ?).
The solutions in 2) both have the drawback that this modifification must be
reverted at some future time (when?), and that they may have unwanted side-
effects (which?). (Not mentioning that tampering with the .cf file always
gives me the creeps - I'm not even 100% sure that these modifications are
possible!)
Comments, anyone?
Per Hedeland
..{decvax, philabs}!mcvax!enea!erix!per or per@erix.UUCP
PS. Of course this problem will go away when we all use domain addressing! :-)per@erix.UUCP (Per Hedeland) (02/28/84)
Regarding the problem with incorrect 'From:' headers:
After a bit more consideration, it seems to me that the best solution (for 4.2
sites, that is, but I suppose they suffer most) would be to force sendmail to
use the contents of the 'From ' line for the 'From:' line, too. (BTW, that is
the same as the value of the -f argument, when sendmail is called by rmail.)
This would simply mean that sendmail should replace an existing 'From:' line
with it's own idea of a correct one. However, I can't find any way to make it
do this (by means of configuration, that is...). Add or delete headers, sure,
but not replace. Anyone got a clue?
Per Hedeland
..{decvax, philabs}!mcvax!enea!erix!per or per@erix.UUCP