Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!ukc!acorn!andy
From: andy@acorn.co.uk (Andy Ingle)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Getting Fullname when all mail is forwarded to server
Message-ID: <1351@acorn.co.uk>
Date: 16 Jan 90 15:24:33 GMT
References: <2596@erix.ericsson.se>
Reply-To: andy@acorn.UUCP (Andy Ingle)
Organization: Acorn Computers Ltd, Cambridge, UK
Lines: 37

In article <2596@erix.ericsson.se> per@erix.ericsson.se (Per Hedeland) writes:
>Environment: Sun's sendmail on SunOS 4.0.3, although I believe this is a
>generic sendmail question.
>
>We have sendmail.cf set up so that all mail sent from (or to) a number of
>clients gets forwarded with SMTP to a mail server (for various reasons we do
>*not* want to use Sun's R option for this). The problem is that when mail is
>sent from one of the clients, sendmail does not pick up and include the full
>name from the gecos field of the senders passwd entry, neither on client nor
>on server (which has passwd entries for all senders).
>
>I can (sort of) understand why this happens, i.e. sendmail doesn't classify the
>sender address as "local" in either case (but for different reasons?), but was
>wondering if someone maybe had some suggestions on how to handle this - I'd
>think that a lot of people would have run into it before... 

I have a network of SUNs, VAXen and Acorn R140's configured as above
but I don't think many sites do it this way.  I have the same problem
and can't see a proper way round it. I've thought of the following
"solutions" but none of them solve the problem cleanly and so far I've
done nothing about it.

 1) If you have source code (I guess you don't) modify the user-interface
    to insert its own "From:" line.
 2) Hack the user-interface binary so that instead of calling sendmail
    it will call some home-made filter to put a "From:" line in.
 3) Abandon the "always forward" principle and use Yellow Pages alias
    database instead.
 4) Introduce a class of "local users" in each sendmail.cf file so that
    local delivery happens for each machine's owner, but SMTP forwarding
    happens for any other name. (This is useless in an environment where
    users may send mail from any machine.)

So if anyone does have a better idea please post it. I would like to
see it too!

--Andy Ingle