Eduardo Chappa <
chappa@washington.edu> wrote:
On Sun, 16 Aug 2020, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
My system administrator asked me to ask you a question of how alpine
sets ENVELOPE FROM.
That is a complicated question to answer because it depends on lots of >details, but in essence the answer is "the email address that Alpine
thinks belongs to the person using the computer used to send the email" >(there is an exception to this later).
Alpine tries to figure out your email address from your username and
domain. The username is the part on the left of the @ symbol in the email >address. In my case it is "chappa". You can set this up in PC-Alpine,
but not in Unix Alpine. The domain is what users configure in the "User >Domain" option in the configuration screen, and if this is not configured, >the name of your computer, or the network it belongs to.
That is the idea, so even though you may be sending messages in the
gmail.com network, your domain might be washington.edu.
This causes problems for roles, so when you are going to send an email
using roles, this is different. In that case, your email address is the >envelope from.
My interpretation of the use of Sender header is that I wouldn't use it
in such a circumstance as it's still my account.
I agree. There is no requirement to use the Sender header. It is an
optional header.
Without use of a Sender header, does the standard require From and
ENVELOPE FROM match unless there's a good reason not to do so?
No, there is no reason why the envelope from and the from address have to >match. The typical user case is of a secretary sending email on behalf of
the boss. In this case you want the From header to be the boss, and the >sender header to be the secretary, so this boils down to a problem of >authorization in the SMTP server, that is, can the secretary send messages >impersonating the boss. The envelope from would be the email address of
the secretary and the from address the one for the boss. The same issue >happens today with calendar events.
In other words, as long as the server allows the sender and the from
header to be different, there is nothing preventing this from happening.
Dear Eduardo,
We had this discussion a few months back. I see from the alpine 2.24
Release Notes that you subsequently changed the default on FEATURE: Do
Not Generate Sender Header to YES. Now, this is something I'd set to YES
years ago because I didn't want X-X-Sender added ('cuz it looked weird)
and I didn't agree that a Sender header was desireable. It wasn't needed locally as I had already authenticated into my account and had
privileges to send Mail.
Could I just point out that the Help text associated with this feature
wasn't updated to reflect the new default setting.
In the second sentence, perhaps change "By default" to "Prior to version
2.24"
This is an old issue that went back to the original pine, maybe in major version 2. I recall reading Mark Cuccia's explanation for the weirdness of
the X-X-Sender header, but I don't seem to have saved his followup article.
I also note that you might update the Help text associated with FEATURE: Scramble the Message-ID When Sending as it continues to refer to
encoding the operating system and program version in the generated
Message-ID, which you are no longer doing as of 2.24.
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