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Re: envelope_from



* On 2005.03.12, in <20050313030302.GA13737@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
*       "luke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <luke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I send mail to an address that doesn't accept my emails because I have
> 'set envelope_from' in my .muttrc. The mail server rejects my mail
> based on the '-f' that 'set envelope_from' uses.

The recipient has no way of knowing whether your envelope sender address
is valid, so it's not clear to me why this happens unless (a) it's
not the recipient rejecting the mail, or (b) the recipient or the
recipient's server is rejecting mail with X-Authentication-Warning:
headers. That's silly if you ask me, but they didn't. So assuming you're
right about (a), let's look at solving (b).


Received: (from luke@localhost)
        by bench.chipcity.com.au (8.12.8/8.12.8/Submit) id j2D332vE013746
        for mutt-users@xxxxxxxx; Sun, 13 Mar 2005 13:33:02 +1030
X-Authentication-Warning: bench.chipcity.com.au: luke set sender to 
luke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx using -f

You're running sendmail locally on bench, but bench doesn't "trust" your
user account to assert the envelope sender address. What this means is
that you can set the envelope sender to anything you want, but sendmail
will keep putting X-Authentication-Warning:s in the header, like a yappy
puppy, to alert everyone that it doesn't know it can trust you.

If you have authority to change the sendmail configuration, you have
two options. You can disable the X-Authentication-Warning header by
taking 'authwarnings' out of confPRIVACY_FLAGS in your .mc file. This
will allow anyone to use -f without penalty. Or you can tell sendmail
to trust your username by putting it into /etc/mail/trusted-users (or
whatever the 'Ft' line in /etc/mail/sendmail.cf or /etc/sendmail.cf
says). This file should just have one username (not e-mail address)
per line -- 'echo luke >>/etc/mail/trusted-users' should do it. This
file used to be called /etc/mail/sendmail.ct before the sendmail people
decided to start wearing user-friendly hats, so you might find it there
instead.

If you're not in control of the system sendmail, you can work your way
out of this by running your own sendmail instance that relays either to
the primary instance on bench, or directly to your next-level relay. Or
you can use some other injection program besides sendmail. It's so easy
to work around this warning -- it lives totally outside SMTP, and only
exists within the local MSA -- that I don't really understand why anyone
would bother paying attention to it.

-- 
 -D.    dgc@xxxxxxxxxxxx                                  NSIT::ENSS
 "So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill...
  and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water
  mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." -HST