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From: David Moore <dmoore@ucsd.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 1997 10:13:17 -0800
In-Reply-To: Kyle Jones's message of Fri, 14 Mar 1997 12:08:02 -0500 (EST)
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Kyle Jones <kyle_jones@wonderworks.com> writes:

> Or the configuration assumes that if you specified a user@FQDN, it is
> what you want and leaves it alone.  This has been the default action
> for stock sendmail configurations since at least the mid-1980's.  What
> Naggum did in the face of this overwhelming number of configurations
> is just pis---, umm, urinating against the prevailing air currents.

To be honest, I think Erik's right: these machines are misconfigured.

But I'm ambivalent as to whether removing

  ;; Do this here in case the init file sets mail-host-address.
  (or user-mail-address
      (setq user-mail-address (concat (user-login-name) "@"
                                      (or mail-host-address
                                          (system-name)))))

from startup.el is bad or not.

If we remove it, we might have fewer complaints of the nature currently
seen.  But I find it a bad idea in general to cater to broken behaviour,
since if we make it transparently work, people won't realize that their
machines are broken, and something will come back to bite us again
later.

And before someone brings it up, I think it's a bad idea to try using a
heursitic to determine if `(system-name)' is returning bad values on
this machine.  Do or do not.  There is no try.

Well I guess there is a already a partial try happening, argh, since
system-name is initalized via looping and looking for the first host
alias which has a `.' in it.  And Gnus seems to have it's own heurstic
for when user-mail-name is nil, which also looks for the presence of a
single period in the outout of `(system-name)'.  Although I guess you
can make the case that Gnus has to deliver news as well, and therefore
can't exclude the `From:' line and hope something else fills it in.


And before we go about leaving user-mail-address set to nil, you might
want to check what things this will break.  Brief checking of our
current lisp tree suggests it'd probably be ok for everything except:
mailcrypt/mc-remail.el
modes/sendmail.el  (this breaks everyone using send-mail-function)
packages/add-log.el
packages/vc.el
pcl-cvs/pcl-cvs.el
psgml/psgml-html.el
utils/smtpmail.el


Looks like the only "good" choices are: 1) Keep the current behaviour,
and for people who want to send mail and whose `(system-name)' returns a
non-FQDN have them either fix their system or set user-mail-address
and/or mail-host-address.  2) _Require_ that everyone manually sets
those before any use of user-mail-address.

-- 
David Moore <dmoore@ucsd.edu>       | Computer Systems Lab      __o
UCSD Dept. Computer Science - 0114  | Work: (619) 534-8604    _ \<,_
La Jolla, CA 92093-0114             | Fax:  (619) 534-1445   (_)/ (_)
<URL:http://oj.egbt.org/dmoore/>    | In a cloud bones of steel.

