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From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: mail.uk-sendmail-workers,comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Full name expansion in From: header
Message-ID: <1990Nov10.003601.27771@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 10 Nov 90 00:36:01 GMT
References: <22619.9011091840@derek.cs.kl.ac.uk>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 73

In article <22619.9011091840@derek.cs.kl.ac.uk> jonathan@cs.kl.ac.uk (Jonathan Knight) writes:
>I have been driven nuts trying to make sendmail put my full
>name on the From: header line.
>
>The problem I see is that any email which originates locally and is
>delivered locally appears with a from line with the full email
>address and full name on.  Any email sent to another host is
>delivered without the full name.  It appears that sendmail has
>declared that the 'x' macro is undefined in these circumstances.
>
>If you want the config file, it's below.

  This topic was just discussed recently.

  To recap, it is because your mail is configured to send mail for local users
to your file server for delivery.

  This is the procedure that 'sendmail' uses for assigning a value to the
'$x' macro.

   If the 'From: ' header already exists, no additional $x is added, even
if the sender name is absent from the existing header.  In other words, for
'sendmail' to add the sender name, there must be no 'From: ' header when
the mail arrives.  As stated in 'sendmail' operations guide, the value of
$x is determined from the 'Full-name:' header if present, then from the
'From:' header if present.  Apparently these statement apply even if the
value so determined is null.

    Now, given that there is no 'From:' line, the next step is for
'sendmail' to determine whether the sender is local.  If not, there is
no attempt to assign a value to $x.

    The determination of whether the sender is local is handled as follows:

	A simulated attempt is made to send mail to the sender.  That is, the
	sender address is parsed by rulesets 3,0.  If this results in selecting
	the local mailer, the user is local, and the operand to $: in the
	mailer selection rewrite rule is the local user name.

In the case of the 'sendmail.cf' enclosed by Jonathan Knight, there was no
rule which selected the local mailer.  Therefore no user will ever be
recognized as local.

I presume that Sun introduced the 'OR' definition into its 'sendmail.cf'
for exactly this reason.  It allowed the local mailer to be selected, but
the local mail to still be forwarded by SMTP to a server.  My friends who
deal a lot with Sun systems tell me that 'OR' causes problems, and they would
just as soon not use it.

For another approach, you might want to pick up the sendmail-5.65+IDA
package from uxc.cso.uiuc.edu.  In the latest config package (1.4.1) I
have an option for sending local mail to a server, yet still correctly
evaluating $x.  To achieve this, it parses a local user so that it selects
the LOCAL mailer when a sender address is being parsed, but so that it
selects the TCP mailer when actual mail is being processed.  However this
can only be done because of the code enhancements in the IDA package.  The
same approach would not work on an unmodified 'sendmail'.  To be more
specific, it requires the $&X option for runtime evaluation of $X.

Another method that has been suggested is to set the mailer flags so that
when local mail is sent to the local server, no 'From: ' header is
generated.  Then the header can be generated on the server machine.  Of
course this presumes the sender has an entry in the passwd file on the
server machine, and will be satisfied with that information for the value
of $x.  Of course this means you can not set $x with the 'NAME' environment
variable, or, worse still, if NAME was defined when the daemon was started
on the server, that may become every user's name.

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115.                                  +1-815-753-6940