Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!odi!benson
From: benson@odi.com (Benson Margulies)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs
Subject: Re: emacs sendmail committing forgery
Keywords: SunOS4.0, GNU Emacs, sendmail
Message-ID: <314@odi.ODI.COM>
Date: 4 May 89 16:04:55 GMT
References: <276@arc.UUCP>
Reply-To: benson@odi.com (Benson Margulies)
Organization: Object Design Inc., Burlington, MA
Lines: 20


   
   Several people at our organization use GNU emacs (18.53) for their mail.
   Until recently, everyone logged in to the main mailhost Sun 3/280 for
   mail purposes. Then we exported the mailhost's /var/spool/mail and
   mounted it on all subsidiary machines. When sending mail to people
   with a local address (e.g. "user"), from emacs running on a subsidiary
   machine, the message arrives claiming to be _from_ the first person
   on the "To: " line. An address of the form "user@machine" doesn't show
   the problem. Nor does the problem show up when using bsd "mail" for
   sending.
   

This is a bug in Sunos 4 sendmail. If getlogin() return 0, which it
does when stdin/out/err is a pipe of a pty without a utmp entry,
sendmail goes batshit. We hacked mail.el to add an explicit -f. 
Sun has acknowledged the bug, and promises a fix "sometime."

-- 
Benson I. Margulies