Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!ucsd!brain!akkana
From: akkana@brain.ucsd.edu (Akkana)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Mail on sunOS 4.0
Message-ID: <1029@ucsd.EDU>
Date: 14 Jul 88 23:48:17 GMT
References: <4442@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> <11232@jade.BBN.COM> <4460@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>
Sender: nobody@ucsd.EDU
Reply-To: akkana@brain.UCSD.EDU (Akkana)
Organization: LOBDTM, U.C. San Diego
Lines: 72

In article <4460@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu> dheller@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Dan Heller) writes:
>In article <11232@jade.BBN.COM> mlandau@bbn.com (Matt Landau) writes:
>	> I (Dan Heller) wrote:
>        >I just heard some very disturbing news about Mail on sunos 4.0.
>        >Apparently, messages no longer have the string:
>        >	From  
>        >at the beginning of each message.  Instead, the string looks like:
>        >	From 
>    
>    I don't know where you heard this, but I just tested mail between 
>    4.0FCS on a Sun-386i and 3.4 on a Sun-3, and your news appears to 
>    be wrong.
>
>Anyway, the latest info is that internet mail appears ok, and uucp
>mail appears ok, but sometimes a mixture will result in the From line
>looking like "From  ".  The "date" always appears.

Well, I guess I'd better interject something here, since I was the one
who sent the flame to Dan which caused him to post in the first place.

The story so far:  I just upgraded my Sun network to 4.0, putting
/usr/spool/mail on an NFS partition (*) and installing the old sendmail.cf
    /*
     (*) This used to require root-over-the-net privs on the client, but
     with 4.0 it no longer does.  So maybe sendmail is setuid()ing to the
     owner of the /usr/spool file in order to deliver the mail, and
     somehow the From line gets changed in the process?
     (Please, no flames about /usr/spool being NFS; users don't like
     rsh'ing all over the net just to read their mail, and I don't
     blame them.)
    */
from 3.4 (it's a .cf which is being used by many Unix machines around
here with no problems I'm aware of).  Under 4.0, mail sent to the
server (akkana@heart.ucsd.edu) works fine, but mail sent to my client
(akkana@brain.ucsd.edu) often has an incorrect From line -- a typical
set of headers might look something like:
	From akkana Tue Jul 12 17:22:16 1988
	Date: Tue, 12 Jul 88 18:20:49 MDT
	From: foo@bar.gov (Foo Bar)
	To: akkana%brain@ucsd.edu

This happens on most internet mail, but usually not on mail which has
been routed through UUCP (i.e. mail from paths with '!'s in them usually
have the correct From line) or mail from users on the local network.
The From: line (with a colon) always seems to be correct.

I haven't figured out yet why this is happening.  It has something to
do with the .cf I'm using, because it doesn't happen with the Sun-
distributed sendmail.main.cf, but it also has something to do with
NFS and 4.0 sendmail, because it happens on the client but not on
the server (it also doesn't happen when I put a .forward on the
client forwarding to the server.)  I called Sun about the problem
and asked whether they knew anything, and was told "That's not a bug,
it's a feature" and that it had something to do with bounced mail
being returned to the right place.  The Sun rep. wasn't able to tell
me the exact nature of this "feature", though (i.e. what changed, what
good is it and how do I disable it?).  (It was after getting off the
phone with Sun that I flamed to to Dan about the problem. :-)

Anyway, Dan's flame was premature, since it's still not clear what's
causing this, so you can all go back to your regularly scheduled
smail installations, unless you know something about this 4.0
sendmail "feature", in which case I'd appreciate hearing from you ...


-- 
        ...Akkana
        LaboratoryForBiologicalDynamicsAndTheoreticalMedicine, UCSD
        akkana%brain@ucsd.edu             sun!brain.ucsd.edu!akkana
 
"What we're dealing with here is a complete lack of respect for the law."
			-- Smokey and the Bandit