ma18@mail-pc.mcs.salford.ac.uk (02/22/90)
FROM: AM Addyman
TO: Sendmail Workers DATE: 02-22-90
TIME: 10:24
CC:
SUBJECT: Advice Please!
PRIORITY:
ATTACHMENTS:
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I am new to Sendmail, so what I am asking may seem stupid to you, but here
goes. I am trying to use a Sun with connections to Janet to route mail to a
proprietary SMTP software package. Everything works EXCEPT that the package
takes the sender to be root on the Sun for all mail originating on Janet,
i.e. although the textual From: field is correct, it is using the RFC
protocol to determine the sender. On the set up here the protocol says that
root on the Sun is the sender. My understanding of sendmail is that if I were
to invoke it using a -f parameter I could overcome this problem. Experiments
directly calling sendmail from the command line tend to confirm this. Now:
do I have the wrong version of mailer.c (it is dated about 1985)?
has the software simply been wrongly installed here?
am I unfortunate in that all sites use this 'trick' (lying in the protocol),
but that the average SMTP implementation uses the textual From: field to get
its information from.
Any advice gratefully accepted.
-- Tony Addyman
jac@doc.ic.ac.uk (Jim Crammond) (02/27/90)
Only "trusted users" can call sendmail with the -f flag - i.e. one that has a "T<user>" entry in the configuration file. The "mailer" program that calls sendmail must setuid to one of the known trusted users. I believe effective uid is not enough - it should do a setuid(geteuid()) if necessary. -Jim.