[comp.mail.mh] "From" field in mh

chinch@cs.cornell.edu (Shirish Chinchalkar) (03/28/91)

    When I use either "dxmail" or "xmh" to send mail from the Decstations,
the "From" field appears as "From: userid@machine" instead of
"From: userid@machine.domain". The problem with this is that the recipient
cannot reply to it using the "r" option in mail, because the domainname
is missing. This does not happen if I use the ordinary UNIX "mail".

    Since both dxmail and xmh are just interfaces to mh, I think the problem
is with some mh configuration. I checked the access times on files in
/usr/new/lib/mh and found that only the files "mtstailor", "MailAliases" and
"components" were accessed. I looked at the man pages of programs such as
send, post, mh-tailor, and tried a few things such as putting
localname: machine.domain in mtstailor and changing the hostname to
machine.domain using the command "hostname" as root; but to no avail.

    sendmail.cf seems to be ok (but then I am no expert) because /usr/ucb/mail
seems to work just fine.

    What am I missing?

      Thanks.

             Shirish.

jch@hollie.rdg.dec.com (John Haxby) (03/28/91)

In article <1991Mar27.194825.2784@cs.cornell.edu>, chinch@cs.cornell.edu (Shirish Chinchalkar) writes:
|>     When I use either "dxmail" or "xmh" to send mail from the Decstations,
|> the "From" field appears as "From: userid@machine" instead of
|> "From: userid@machine.domain". The problem with this is that the recipient
|> cannot reply to it using the "r" option in mail, because the domainname
|> is missing. This does not happen if I use the ordinary UNIX "mail".

I can't comment on the behaviour of UCB mail because I
don't know it well enough. However, I do know that the
standard ULTRIX sendmail config file has a tendency
(well, it does it all the time) to use abbreviated host
names instead of FQDN's.  Fixing this is easy
in principle (explicitly define $w to be the FQDN), but
in practice rather hard.  A good middle-ground approach
seems to be to replace $w with $j in selected mailer-specific
rulesets.
-- 
John Haxby, Definitively Wrong.
Digital				<jch@wessex.rdg.dec.com>
Reading, England		<...!ukc!wessex!jch>