Re: Who sets Sender:?

[Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>]

/ Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> was heard to say:
| * Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>  on Mon, 20 May 2002
| | When I send mail, the Sender: goes out as "ndw@mercury", but
| | (message-make-sender) returns "ndw@nwalsh.com". Why isn't
| | sender set to message-make-sender?
|
| Because then a Sender header would be unnecessary.  From and Sender should
| never have the same mailbox.
|
| Sender contains the mailbox of the agent responsible for submitting the
| message to the network (MTA).  The idea is that while the originator
| mailbox may be ndw@nwalsh.com, the Sender is the local user on the local
| machine.

Ok, fair enough. So this presents an interesting conundrum. In my
case, the "local machine" has no name. I'm on a laptop behind a
firewall attached to a cable provider that generates a "random" IP
address via DHCP.

So, on my local subnet (192.168.1.*), "mercury" is this laptop. But
there's no global name for it.

I can't claim that it's 'mercury.nwalsh.com' because no such machine
exists in DNS.

I can't claim that it's n206.cableprovider.net (or whatever the name
for the DHCP provided address is) because that's on the other side of
the firewall (and anything sent to it gets dropped on the floor
anyway).

So my messages go out with

  Sender: ndw@mercury

Fine. I could care less, really. But it turns out that some random
router inside the corporate firewall sometimes "adjusts" this for me,
so that recipients see, for example:

  Sender: ndw@mercury.ireland.mycorp.com

Which strikes me as really wrong.

I could:

1. Ignore it.

2. Report this as an error to the IT folks at mycorp, if in fact
   they're wrong to fux with my Sender: header. (Yeah, that's going to
   be really productive :-)

3. Suppress Sender: as Matt suggested.

4. ...?

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> | This mortal life is a little thing,
http://nwalsh.com/            | lived in a little corner of the earth;
                              | and little, too, is the longest fame to
                              | come--dependent as it is on a
                              | succession of fast-perishing little men
                              | who have no knowledge even of their own
                              | selves, much less of one dead and
                              | gone.--Marcus Aurelius