bill@allegra.tempo.nj.att.com (Bill Schell) (09/28/90)
A few of the mailers around here like to send out messages with valid 'From' header lines, but with no 'From:' header line (note the absence of a colon in the first case). When messages gets these, it lists the sender as "<unknown sender>". Does anyone else have this problem? I believe that this is semi-typical in the UUCP world. How would one go about making messages look at the 'From' line if the 'From:' line is missing? Thanks very much, Bill Schell AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill, NJ bill@allegra.att.com PS: here's a typical message header of the type I mentioned -------------------- From alice!bill Tue Sep 4 11:19:20 1990 Date: Tue, 4 Sep 90 11:19:03 EDT To: bill@allegra.att.com . . .
Craig_Everhart@TRANSARC.COM (09/28/90)
Messages, and indeed AMS, is an RFC822 mail user agent. It assumes that incoming messages are roughly RFC822-conformant. The ``From_'' line (as it's conventionally referred to) is lots like the RFC822 Return-path: line in that it contains the envelope-from information, but it also contains a timestamp-when-received. It's not at all a plug-replacement for the From: line. I would argue, further, that it's not even a good loose replacement for the From: information. Sure, somebody could dink with the caption-building code to have it look for a From_ line for the message sender, but I think it's silly, and would point the ``problem'' back to the originators of From:-less mail. Craig
nsb@THUMPER.BELLCORE.COM (Nathaniel Borenstein) (09/28/90)
Excerpts from internet.info-andrew: 27-Sep-90 handling messages with miss.. Bill Schell@allegra.temp (716) > A few of the mailers around here like to send out messages with valid > 'From' header lines, but with no 'From:' header line (note the absence > of a colon in the first case). When messages gets these, it lists the > sender as "<unknown sender>". Does anyone else have this problem? I > believe that this is semi-typical in the UUCP world. How would one go > about making messages look at the 'From' line if the 'From:' line is > missing? I believe that this problem should go away completely with patch 7. I haven't yet installed patch 7, but it contains a patch that I sent in, which is a variant on a previous suggestion by Lennart Lovstrand. It will turn the UNIX "From " lines into valid RFC 822 "Return-path" headers. The main motivation for this fix was to allow re-sending of multimedia mail, which was broken when "From " lines were present and sendmail got its fingers in the pie. However, a side effect will be to fix your case, too, because "Return-path" is used as a last resort in building captions if there's no "From", "Resent-From", or "Sender" header. (See ams/libs/ms/prettyn.c for the whole algorithm.) Thus, although that wasn't the intent of the patch, I think it should be fixed with patch 7. How's that for service -- the latest patch fixed your bug before you reported it, and you were told about the fix before anyone from CMU had time to respond!