[comp.mail.sendmail] "Apparently-To:" header and sendmail. How to fix?

ram@lionet.wesley.oz.au (Richard Muirden) (02/07/91)

When mail comes of the net (ACSnet) to us and is processed by sendmail,
the To: line is ignored and an Apparently-To: line is produced.

This causes some nasy mail to be produced like so:

From bevan%ecr.mu.oz@munnari.cs.mu Tue Feb  5 16:15:26 1991
Return-Path: <jajc>
Date: Tue, 5 Feb 91 15:23:26 EDT
From: bevan%ecr.mu.oz@munnari.cs.mu
Received-Date: Tue, 5 Feb 91 16:14:58 EDT
Apparently-To: jajc

>From bevan%ecr.mu.oz@munnari.oz Tue Feb  5 15:21:27 1991
Received: from julimar8.ecr.mu.OZ.AU by munnari.oz.au with SMTP (5.64+1.3.1+0.50)
	id AA01129; Tue, 5 Feb 1991 15:21:27 +1100 (from bevan@ecr.mu.oz.au)
Received: by ecr.mu.oz.au (4.1)
	id AA00303; Tue, 5 Feb 91 15:21:13 EST
Date: Tue, 5 Feb 91 15:21:13 EST
From: bevan@ecr.mu.oz.au (Bevan the Aviator.)
Message-Id: <9102050421.303@ecr.mu.oz.au>
To: cahill, jajc@lionet.wesley.oz.au

The header of the incoming article is destroyed and placed in the mail
message body! This is confusing and, frankly, a pain in the back.

If anyone has any ideas on how to tackle this, I'd be pleased to
hear them!

regards,

Richard Muirden


==============================================================================
Richard Muirden,                         |Humble Computer Science Student &
System Administrator,                    |Star Trek Fan!
Wesley College Melbourne (Prahran Campus)+--My opinions are my own-----------
mail: ram@lionet.wesley.oz.au            |mail: s892024@minyos.xx.rmit.oz.au
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Excuse me, I'm looking for Nuclear Wessels" - Chekov, STIV:TVH
=============================================================================

kre@cs.mu.OZ.AU (Robert Elz) (02/11/91)

rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

>In article <116@lionet.wesley.oz.au> ram@lionet.wesley.oz.au (Richard Muirden) writes:
>>When mail comes of the net (ACSnet) to us and is processed by sendmail,
>>the To: line is ignored and an Apparently-To: line is produced.

> You have some broken software somewhere.

yes, he does - a broken ACSnet configuration.

The real problem is that on ACSnet there's no real standard as to
whether messages should be passed around with a leading "From " line
(ala uucp), or without (ala the internet).   (The line isn't needed
to convey envelope info as it is with uucp).

Combine that with some sites with very primitive mailers that absolutely
require a "From " line on the front of the message they receive,
and others that don't care whether its there or not and you have
potential disaster.   (Fortunately I'm not aware of any that rebel
if they see it - at least not just one).

So, ACSnet has a configuration option (MAIL_FROM for ACSnet people)
which will unilaterally add a "From " line to the start of the
message if configured on - sites that must have a "From " line
should enable this so the line is always there (at the cost of
perhaps having two "From " lines if there was one already).

Sites that don't care whether the "From " line is there or not
(incl sendmail sites) should disable MAIL_FROM - sendmail will
happily discard a single "From " line at the start of a message,
but doesn't at all like getting two of them (at least unless
there's a "remote from" clause in there as well, that ACSnet
doesn't do).

>If possible, try to look at the data which enters sendmail.  If 'sendmail'
>is talking SMTP to ACSnet this will be tricky.  If the message is just
>piped in, you can temporarily replace 'sendmail' by a shell script which
>dumps its arguments into one file and its standard input into another.

Its run from a pipe, this technique works just fine to debug problems.

>Look for a leading blank line.  Or perhaps a line beginning '>From '.
>A line beginning 'From ' in theory should not be a problem, as sendmail
>is supposed to know about those and discard them.

What you get is two leaging "From " lines in messages that are going
to cause problems (or in some versions of ACSnet, a "From " line and
a ">From " line - the '>' added to keep even more primitive mail
systems from treating this as 2 messages, the first a very short one....

kre