Re: Hmm... what gives with that mail??
On Wed, May 17, 2000 at 06:33:04PM +0200, Marek Habersack wrote:
> Hi *,
>
> Take a look at the message below. I have just received it from the
> debian-user list. There would be nothing strange in it if not for the fact
> that the person who posted it (apparently from the wcom.com domain as seen
> in the full logs) appears to have an address bolan@debian.vip.net.pl - that
> is in _my_ domain :)). The problem is that neither no bolan or
> debian.vip.net.pl exist! Our mailer is not an open relay, the user posted it
> from the wcom.com domain (see the attached full logs).
> I wonder whether the other people on the list received posts from
> bolan@debian.YOUR.DOMAIN.COM?
They would if they had a host named 'debain.YOUR.DOMAIN.COM'.
Sendmail (and probably other smtp servers) tries to canonify names in
headers. This is a semi-helpful process, but it usually is correct to
do. (See RFC1123, section 5.2.18, which mandates using fqdn's which is
why sendmail, trying to be nice, tries to fix partial names it sees.)
Sites without a machine named 'debain.whatever.com' (ie 'nslookup
debian' fails) will leave it as 'bolan@debian'.
Even more obvious of the same thing is people who send mail as just
'username' which gets canonified as username@whatever.com by each
recipient. (Spammers do this reasonably often judging from how often
our users complain about it.)
Looks like the original sender needs to fix their mail setup to use the
fqdn.
--
Brian Moore | Of course vi is God's editor.
Sysadmin, C/Perl Hacker | If He used Emacs, He'd still be waiting
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Netscum, Bane of Elves.
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