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From: David Moore <dmoore@ucsd.edu>
Date: 14 Mar 1997 11:17:29 -0800
In-Reply-To: Kyle Jones's message of Fri, 14 Mar 1997 13:29:52 -0500 (EST)
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Kyle Jones <kyle_jones@wonderworks.com> writes:

> What broken behavior?  Emacs chooses an address that is wrong and
> feeds it to sendmail.  sendmail assumes that this address, being
> syntactically valid, is what you meant, and leave it alone.  How
> is this sendmail's fault, or the system administrators fault?
> What is broken, other than Emacs?

The problem reported is that `(system-name)' on sun's often returns a
non-FQDN, and the installed of emacs didn't set mail-host-address in the
site-init.el file.  The problem is that these machines connected to a
network have no idea what their own name is other than `foo', they don't
know that they are also `foo.bar.com'.

Perhaps the XEmacs install process, should demand a proper hostname.
But that doesn't work with binary distributions.

The fact is that lots of things want to know the user's real mail
address, and _are not_ going to be talking to sendmail.  There needs to
be a mechanism to get this info to them.  user-mail-address serves that
purpose.  And there is code which currently depends on user-mail-address
having a string in it.

Perhaps the way to go would be to make a user-mail-address (name
unimportant) function and get it in fsf emacs and get people to start
using it.  The function could look at `user-mail-address', if it's a
string return that.  If it's nil, but `mail-host-address' is set, return
(concat (login-name) "@" mail-host-address).  If `user-mail-address' is
`t' then return (concat (login-name) "@" (system-name)).  Ie, the user
has confirmed that the system-name is correct for his machines, but
doesn't want to set the information forcing to a specific host.
Otherwise if both aren't set, QUERY the user as to if (concat
(login-name) "@" (system-name)) is really their return address.  If they
say 'y', offer to stick (setq user-mail-address t) in their .emacs  If
they say 'n', ask them their hostname and user name and offer to stick
those in their .emacs.

Things which talk directly to sendmail, such as vm could look if
user-mail-address is t and then chose not to pass a `From ' line to
sendmail, otherwise it'd call this function to determine what value to
use.

Things which want to know the user's address and don't talk to sendmail,
such as gnus, add-log, html modes, w3, feedmail, smtpmail, etc, simply
always call this function.


Not everything which needs the user's email address talks to sendwhale.
-- 
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.

