Re: diagnosing smail
On Fri, 27 Feb 1998 11:08:26 EST, Daniel Martin wrote:
> My interpretation is that smail only makes use of the from_field
> variable if incoming mail has no "From:" or "Sender:" fields already;
> further, if there is a From: field already, then smail inserts a
> "Sender:" field using the from_field information only if the
> pre-existing From: field doesn't match what smail would have written
> with from_field.
IOW: If I'm replying to a message, the header writing will be different
than if I send a new message? I'd not fully considered this previously.
This would explain why on at least one occasion I got good headers on a
new mail, but a reply mail showed faulty headers. I wish I'd thought of
this before. Perhaps I'm close to a fix. I'll try getting back to that
point and work from there.
What is the order of operations between /etc/smail/transports and
/etc/smail/config, when modifying, adding, removing header lines, in
terms of which "goes first and last" ?
> Ok - the idea is that the From: line should be the email address of
> the person the mail is from, whereas the Sender: is the email address
> of the account the mail is from, if that's different. (Sender:
> headers are not required if the From: address also represents the
> account the mail comes from). [..]
IOW: I need the Sender: line because my local hostname is not my isp's?
The sender line is good, because it tells where I'm connected when the
message was sent, but does it make sense for my mail to be
accepted/rejected based on a temporary hostname? This is what my isp
told me had occurred.
My isp may have misled me about the problem when they said my Sender:
line was incorrect. Someone recently mentioned that their From: line was
rejected by a specific isp due to the form: "user@isp.com (joe user)",
which is the same I use. I've read that this form is valid, and that
the other usage "joe user <user@isp.com>" is ok to use, but not as well
in keeping with the RFC's. (I think I read this in some mh/nmh/exmh
docs.) So maybe my mail wasn't being rejected solely on the account of
my Sender: line, maybe it was being rejected on the account of the
combination of Sender: line *and* the form of my From: line. IOW:
my From: line was never looked at previously, because my Sender: line
was good, but now that my Sender: line is bad, my From: line is being
rejected. This might be a good time to ask: Which form is best?
> I think there are historic reasons (before from_field was used for
> "Sender:" fields) for having it begin with "From:".
IOW: the from_field code always modifies the From: line?
So why did the man page indicate the from_field wrote the From: or the
Sender: line?
There is one consequence of this which ties in with an earlier point:
if the from_field code I inserted is not behaving properly, it
could result in my Sender: line being written in a way other than I
desired and this could be why my Sender: line is inncorrect.
Thanks for the test code; by removing the conditions, I got it to work.
The results show that all my variables appear as I've assigned them, so
now I just have to figure out where the logic is going awry in my
configuration. I wonder what chance there is that MH is causing this
turmoil (I switched back to MH from nmh, but at the higher hamm level.)
--
David Stern
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