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Re: Pine

>>>>> "Richard" == Richard Stevenson <RichardS [at] advantagegroup.co.nz> writes:

    Richard> ?  I was talking about MAIL FROM:<richard [at] sheflug.co.uk>.

This is functionally identical to the Return-Path: header (which I
mistyped as "Path:").

Either way, this is a lie, because no host in that domain is on the
reverse path.  (I'm assuming Richard's ISDN connection is not
www.sheflug.co.uk.)  An RFC 821-conforming receiver MTA, which
Sendmail is, _should_ bite you for it.[1]

MAIL FROM is supposed to be a reverse source route to the originator
of the message (more or less the RFC-822 SENDER, but not exactly; for
example the maintainer of a mailing list must change the MAIL FROM
address to point to himself, not to the author or sender of the
message), not to the author of the message.  Its purpose is error
returns, and it should go to the originating domain, preferably the
originating host if it is capable of handling SMTP.  In general the
author need not know or care if errors crop up.

It is common practice for a variety of reasons to put the author's
address _on the local machine_ in the reverse path, but as far as I
can tell from RFCs 821 and 1123 it must be a local address.  Your wife
probably should be using a NULL reverse path (MAIL FROM: <>) or a path
to her POP account (or whatever) on the PPP gateway, so that all her
mail appears to originate from the PPP gateway.  Or the gateway could
make that substitution.


Footnotes: 
[1]  Of course it's kinda difficult to discover the lie if the host
resolves and there's a user of that name there.

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