SUMMARY- Bad From Field in Email-Sporadically

From: Craig L. Gruneberg (clg@csph.psu.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 28 1996 - 13:02:44 CST


I penned the following on 10/24/96:

********************************************************
The configuration:

About 10 Suns all running Solaris 2.5.1
and NIS
with one mailhost

Intermittently I get email from some of the clients where the
>From field is only:

userid@mailhost

Other times this same client has the full domain name after mailhost.

All clients are running the stock subsidiary.cf. Some clients
never exhibit the shortened From field and some, as I said,
do it every so often.

Anyone run into this before? Will summarize.
*********************************************************

I received 3 responses which I would like to thank the senders for
although none of the replies hit on the solution.

What I am trying is to insert:

Dmdomain.psu.edu

in the sendmail.cf file on the clients that are giving me a problem.
Looks like NIS might be the cause of this behavior since when I attempted
to implement the suggestion from Joachim Krumlinde I got:

userid@methcenter.psu.edu

where methcenter is the NIS domainname, not the DNS domain name.

The replies follow:

*******************************************************
From: Jim Harmon <jim@telecnnct.com>

Where I've seen this is when users have fully-qualified-domain-names
(FQDN) in their "signature" or local email tool (elm, pine, etc.).

The tool automatically inserts the user's specified "reply address" in
the "from:" field. The times the FQDN is not seen is when the user(s)
use a different mail tool that only specifies the user's alias name in
your master aliases list. The will default to the short domainname.

Another thing to consider is that any mail that is considered LOCAL will
only use the mailhost's default name in the "from" path if not
specified, while any mail that is intended for external (foreign)
delivery will include the entire FQDN so the remote system will know
where to send replies.

I don't think you have any kind of problem with your settup.

*******************************************************
From: Joachim Krumlinde
krumlinde@fysik.lu.se

 Hello:

 I have had this problem - not intermittently but with only some
machines in a network, whereas others behaved reasonably. I never
understood why there was a difference, but the problem was solved
by changing a line in ruleset 11 in sendmail.cf

R$+ $@$1<@$k> tack on my mbox hostname

changed to

R$+ $@$1<@$k.$m> tack on my mbox hostname

and the problem went away.

I believe the same problem was addressed in the beginning of August
on this list (patenaua@oecss1.otis.utc.com (Allen Patenaude), I think)
and a similar solution was suggested

********************************************************
From: cathy@mercury.stm.com (Cathy Hargrave)

have you checked the entry for the mailhost in the /etc/vfstab
file? solaris 2.4 and 2.5.x generate that from name using
the mount point. if the problem is caused by that, though, it
will be consistent, not sporadic as you described.



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