wilber@alice.UUCP (02/02/88)
I have a minor problem with Gnu Emacs rmail on my AT&T 3b1. Since it's a one
user system most of my mail comes from remote computers communicating via uucp.
I am using the vanilla Unix mail that comes with the 3.51 software, and HDB
uucp. A typical message from my mailbox starts like this:
From uucp Mon Feb 1 05:26 EST 1988
>From kw Mon Feb 1 00:22 EST 1988 remote from kathypc
The problem is that Emacs uses "uucp" as the address to reply to, rather than
kathypc!kw. (This message is "from" uucp in the same sense that my bills are
"from" the mailman.) So I always have to edit the "To" field when replying to
mail. Is there a simple change of parameters to either Unix mail or Emacs so
that Emacs will figure out the proper return address? Or <shudder> am I really
going to have to learn how to muck around with the elisp code for rmail?
Also, what is mh mail, as in mh-rmail and mh-smail? (When I tried out mh-rmail
it complained about my lack of a .mh-profile file.)
Bob Wilber Work: UUCP: {ihnp4, mtune}!gauss!wilber
ARPA: wilber@gauss.att.com
Home: UUCP: {ihnp4, mtune}!gauss!heaven!rewkarl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (02/04/88)
You're probably going to have to muck around in the rmail lisp. When the rmail code hunts through the headers looking for relevant things, it fails to find a From: unless you're using a proper mailer - a lot of smaller machines understandably don't have such proper mailers, and so there is no From:. So the rmail lisp looks at the next likely candidate, the initial From_ line, finds "uucp" there, and begins to believe at that point that "uucp" sent it to you. The way to change this would be to convince the rmail lisp code that, on finding no From: but a valid From_ line (claiming uucp), it should recursively hunt for >From_ lines until it gets to the last one, and take the implicit From: line from that. Alternatively, you could force everyone with whom you correspond to bring up a decent mailer. Smail is the obvious choice for SysV boxes; I've heard of sendmail implementations for SysV, too, but have never used one myself. If all of your correspondents use such a decent mailer, then there will always be From: lines, and your problem goes away. -=- Karl