Re: Sender header?

[prj@po.cwru.edu (Paul Jarc)]

Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> writes:
> * Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann)  on Fri, 25 May 2001
>| The defacto standard for the locally interpreted string has changed.
>| These days, people want to hide the login names for security purposes.
> 
> That is what things like sendmail's rewrite rules and tables are for.

The fact that it can be done outside of Gnus doesn't alone make a good
case that it shouldn't also be possible to do it within Gnus.  Not all
MTAs may have such features.

>| A domain-literal need not be a FQDN, it can also be a domain name.
>| For example, uni-dortmund.de is a possible domain-literal, even though
>| there is no such host.
> 
> A domain name is by its nature fully qualified.

RFC 1034 doesn't use the term "fully qualified", but it does use
"absolute" and "relative".  A domain name is a sequence of labels
which, in text representation, are separated by dots.  An absolute
domain name is one whose last label is the empty string, which
designates the root domain - thus, its last character is a dot.
Anything else is relative, and is subject to absolutification
according to local configuration.  (Also, there is no notion of a
"hostname" which is different from "domain name"; a hostname is simply
a domain name with an address record, and the term "hostname" is not
used in the DNS RFCs.)

In practice, people think of a domain name containing a dot *anywhere*
as being absolute ("fully qualified"), and only those with *no* dots
as being relative.  The only reason people can get away with this is
because their own local configurations make it work.  The name
"www.gnus.org." is absolute, but the name "www.gnus.org" is not.  The
most common way of making it absolute is to first try it in the root
domain (i.e., just add a dot at the end), and then if that fails, try
it in the local domain(s).  OTOH, the name "www" is usually looked for
first in the local domain(s) and then in the root.  But the presence
of an internal dot only affects the local absolutification
configuration, not whether the name is absolute to begin with.

I've set user-mail-address to end with "." (I think this violates
2822, but I won't care until it actually breaks something), and I set
message-syntax-checks to include (from . disabled), but my From fields
still have no trailing ".". :(  Anyone know how to do this?  I don't
want to depend on others' local configurations.


paul