Re: Help/Info on E-Mail Headers
At 09:37 14.10.2001, Donald R. Spoon wrote:
An earlier post "mail headers - why do they differ? Sam Varghese "
caused me to do a bit of investigation here, and I noted the same thing
happening on my posts to this group. Since I don't have an MTA setup to
pass my E-Mail on to the internet, I use the Road Runner SMTP & POP
servers for all my external E-Mail MTA needs. I noticed that their
servers were making "SENDER" line that was composed of my LAN username +
the host name of the (supposed) SMTP server. You can probably see it on
this post, where "dad" is the username only on my LAN.
Now here comes the interesting part. It only does this when I use the
Netscape E-Mail client! It doesn't do this with KMAIL or OUTLOOK
(blush). So it appears that Netscape is doing something that the other
clients are not doing....or vice-versa, maybe. I have searched through
all the config options that I can find in Netscape, but I can't see
anything that seems to be wrong.
I think reason is that netscape works diffrently with mail
than many other email clients, it seems to rely more to username
and passwords than any other I know. My bet is that it relies
on POP/SMTP authentication where it has to log to POP or somehow
log in before you can send with it. Thus, username comes to message
because authentication it requires in the process.
Also some mailservers that require pop/smtp authentication may send username
too. Haven't looked, but would be logical if such mailservers would do it,
unless wisely
admins rewrite them. However, 'Sender' header I've understood should
*not* be tampered with if we're honest and follow guidelines set to
email. Still I suspect most admins don't want to send usernames with
messages.
How that 'Sender' header comes, depends largely on
on network, mail clients and smtp server. Personally first thing
if I rewrited was that header from my Exim mailserver. My Eudora(which I
now use) in
Windows. seems to use it if end from same mail account than I get mail;
however other
profiles/email addresses that have no way to ability to send and don't need
usernames to log
in my server, seem to sended without sender in them as a default. Mozilla
also doesn't
seem to.
Netscape doesn't seem to offer way to send without authentication which needs
username, thus I suspect it can be bit hard to send from it without the
username.
Bit overblown solution would be install something like exim that would use
your ISP mailservers as smarthost and that would rewrite the headers. With
that
one could rewrite most of headers, even user agent. Personally, I've
rewrited headers
from webmail, Outlook, Microsoft STMP(in my LAN), Eudora and others so that it
would look I always use same client.
I'm not paranoid, but as it is possible and no problems arise from it, so
why not use it?
- Antti
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