Re: Who sets Sender:?

[Barry Fishman <barry_fishman@att.net>]

Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com> writes:

> / Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> was heard to say:
> | 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.

I suspect this situation is very common.  My home network name I keep
as just ".local" since at least conveys the impression that it will
not be found from DNS, and is not expected to be unique.  I was also
wondered about a message-id which was not anchored to a unique
address.

The approach I take is probably a bit convolved but begins by
giving my system a unique name which should be at least traceable
by humans:

(setq mail-host-address "barry_fishman.att.net")

Which is my ISP username grafted into its network domain.
I then convince the message package to use it, and not send any
sender field:

(setq gnus-local-domain "att.net")

;; I don't really have valid FQDN information so clean up header
(setq message-syntax-checks '((sender . disabled)))

;; Makes sure (message-make-fqdn) uses mail-host-address when we
;; are on the .local network.
(setq message-bogus-system-names "^localhost\\.\\|\\.local$")

Convincing smtp-mail the same is a bit harder:

;; Use smtpmail
(setq send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it)          ; for 'mail'
(setq message-send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it) ; for 'gnus'

;; Force smtpmail to use mail-host-address
(autoload 'smtpmail-fqdn "smtpmail" nil nil)
(defadvice smtpmail-fqdn (around change-smtpmail-fqdn activate)
  "Supply a domain which is meaningful but wrong"
  (setq ad-return-value mail-host-address))

I could have just let my ISP generate the message ID, but then
I couldn't:

;;;; Archive all messages you send out here
(setq gnus-message-archive-group "nnmh:list.sent")
(setq gnus-gcc-mark-as-read t) ; Doesn't seem to do much

and expect to get access to the message-id of the sent message.

Then again, with all the spam about, making your messages more
tracable is not necessarily a good idea.

-- 
Barry