She stares at the screen, at the little words of green

[venta]

Does anyone know how to explain to PINE what email address you want your mail to appear to come from ?

By editing the .pinerc file, I've managed to get the domain-name part of the address set (thank you failmaster), but the part-before-the-@ seems to be stuck as my unix username. Changing the personal-name field in the .pinerc file doesn't help.

For curiosity value only, is it possible to set the domain name from within PINE's own config system ? It seems like it ought to be doable without editing the file directly, but I can't find any evidence of it.

In other news, The Calendar says today is the feast day of St Drogo, a patron of coffeehouse owners and a protector against "gravel" in the urine.

Which is nice. I had no idea that getting gravel in your urine was a risk, but if it is I damn well want to be protected from it.

Comments

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Does this achieve what you want ?

[venta.livejournal.com]

I thought that changed the appears-to-be-from rather than the actually-from.

On the other hand, now I come to think about it, I'm actually a little hazy as to how I'm defining either of those.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

With my sysadmin hat on, I have to say that I wouldn't want a piece of user-level software changing anything more than appears-to-be-From and reply-To.

Changing who the email is really from is something I used to do a lot called 'faking email'. There are benign uses, but we don't like to offer support for it because there are also some very evil uses.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I want to do it for this reason:

I have bought a domain name, and some mail hosting. If I send mail shelled-in to the server which hosts my mail, it appears to be from username@nastynamefullofnumbers.com.

I'd like it to be from elizabeth@nicenewname.com.

It's currently appearing from username@nicenewname.com.

Though actually, now I come to look at the headers, I think it's only spoofing the from line anyway, I haven't changed anything 'really'.

So maybe your original suggestion is what I want, after all. It's a useful reference anyway, thanks!

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Your reason for wanting to do it is the usual one, but what if you decide to send email from: someone_you_dislike@theirdomain.com to theirboss@bigcorporate.com with creatively chosen content of your own devising ?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, I'm aware that it's abusable. I was just explaining what I wanted to do in case someone was going to say "oh, well, in that case you want to do it like this" (or indeed tell me that spoofing the from was all I wanted to do).

(And anyway, the answer is I'd telnet to their mail host on port 25 :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

It should refuse either your connection or your forwarding request.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

In which case you use a tame SMTP server to connect to the mail server of the person you're sending the message *to*.

Unless you're also blocking user-mode outbound connections on port 25 from every machine venta might ever be able to use, security in email clients is completely pointless for this purpose if the person being protected has any means of performing their own authentication (or reading the fucking list of IP addresses in the fucking headers), and not good enough if they don't.

On my hired shell account I can set pretty much any header field to pretty much anything I like, but I have not yet been able to get rid of the X-Envelope-Sender: header, and I certainly can't change the first "received from" header which identifies my username on the actual machine.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Unless you're also blocking user-mode outbound connections on port 25 from every machine venta might ever be able to use

And if he can, I shall start to feel extremely victimised.

Not to mention paranoid.

[waistcoatmark.livejournal.com]

Anyone who pays makes any important decisions based on the from: line shouldn't be allowed to make important decisions.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Nah - we're talking about faking the 'Sender:' line, get with the plot.

No non-programmer is ever going to check the Sender line, I just don't believe it.

[pm215]

Some flavours of Lotus Notes are so badly broken that they send mail to the address in Sender: if the user tries to do a normal 'reply' action...

[chrisvenus]

I was about to make useful comments nad then noticed they were all said in that page you linked to.

What do you consider the "appears-to-be-From" header out of interest given that the page you linked to told you how to change the actual From: header...

[venta.livejournal.com]

When I was saying appears-to-be-from, I was meaning "thing that appears in the from header".

I was asking about actually changing the address in such a way that someone couldn't examine the headers and say "ah, but it was *actually* from username@nastynamefullofnumbers.com".

It's looking, however, like what I actually want to do is just change the from line after all. As I've mentioned, I'm a little bit vague about a lot of this and how it works.

[chrisvenus]

Ah, all the other headers are nothing to do with your e-mail address and just to do with the computer you have come from (assuming you are talking about things like the recevied headers). I can think of no way you could change these (without full access to the machine you are sending through) and no reason you would want to (since they are invisible to most and only really useful for stalking^wchecking where somebody came from if they are sending abuse, etc.

But yeah, as somebody who does this myself From line is all you need. :)

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

I think you can set an environment variable for personal name, but off the top of my head I can't remember what it is...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Would that necessarily help ? If you think of an address as:

"My Real Name" <myusername@domain>

Setting the personal name in the .pinerc file only alters My Real Name, not myusername.

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

Well, as username is an environment variable anyway, you can alter it independently of Pine by adding a set username <what-you-want> to your .login or .cshrc - but this might affect other bits & bats, not just pine. You can set a default reply-to address as an environment variable, too.

Am I barking up the wrong tree, though?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ah... if I can set username that might do what I want. Since it seems to be distinct from personal-name.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmmm.
set username elizabeth
added to .login script, but that doesn't seem to have changed anything.

How much difference is there between the thing-that-appears-in-the-from-line and the address-the-email-is-actually-from, for some value of actually ? I'm a bit confused. Is it sufficient to change the from line ?

At the moment, I'm sending emails which are from username@mydomainname, and I want them to be from elizabeth@mydomainname.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Found somewhere in the documentation that bateleur referenced:

user-id

PC-Pine only and personal configuration file only. Sets the username that is placed on all outgoing messages. The username is the part of the address that comes before the "@". The easiest way to change the full From address is with the customized-hdrs variable.

Which kind of implies that if the thing you've tried doesn't work, then you're out of options with Pine.

Any reason why you need to send stuff from within the unix box providing your domainname anyway? You could just send it from your PC, having set the from address (which is what I do).

[venta.livejournal.com]

Any reason why you need to send stuff from within the unix box providing your domainname anyway? You could just send it from your PC

Because that requires me to be in the same physical location as my PC. Which I'm not when, for example, at work.

(And I don't want to leave my laptop running all the time, so logging in remotely isn't a very sensible option either.)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Same principle applies though: using Opera here, I've got two (well, five actually) accounts. One checks my personal mailbox, and uses my own email address for outgoing email. 3 check my work email (via 2 different POP servers, and 1 IMAP), and use my work email address on outgoing email.

Which is why, occasionally, you've had email from my work address: I forgot to switch accounts before I hit send.

Mutt, incidentally, actually allows rules for this sort of thing, so it can automagically switch the From: line according to the contents of the To: line, and finger trouble becomes a thing of the past.

This isn't going to work if your work mail server is "too strict" and insists that it will only relay mail if either the "From:" or "To:" lines specify an account in your domain (rather than allowing any machine in the domain to send, irrespective of the fields). However, I'd suspect your sysadmins are lenient enough to use the useful definition. Unless the reorganization has turned them into jobsworths.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Firstly, I don't think the mailserver is IMAP-friendly.
Secondly, you have the knowledge to organise this kind of set up, I don't. And yes, someone else might do it for me, but I'd rather have a set up I understand and can maintain myself.
Thirdly, when our horrible work .sig was introduced ages back, I asked about the possibility of popping my own mail here and using that instead of my work mail, and was told that I couldn't sent mail via Tao's mailservers which didn't have the .sig appended.

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Your reading in complications I didn't intend to imply. Basically, by adding a second account, my Windows-based mail client allows me to pick which From: line I want. But, on the other hand, I don't get a large legalise footer forced onto my emails, I can see that as being a reason to use a different mail server.

(I've actually set my home box up to act as a secure mail relay, so I can send mail through that, irrespective of the domain my machine is living in. I can add you to the access list, if you wish.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

By popping my mail home, and shelling in the rest of the time, I don't end up with the problem of copies of sent mail ending up all over the show (or of having to send myself copies). Which is one of the things I most keen to avoid: I'd like as much of my mail as possible to be as accessible as possible from anywhere.

And to be as simple-to-operate as possible. I can cope with PINE :)

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

It's a guess. But I think the "gravel" in the Urine could be related to getting a gall stone, which was a highly painful and generally fatal condition. There was a cure but it was so uncertain and so likely to kill you since it invloved being cut open that many people would rather jsut die.

Of course I could be wrong.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think you're right, but there was better mileage in the misunderstanding :)

Watch out for jiggs in your tea.

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

Never drink tea. ON the other hand I'm going through bottles of Physics at a terrible rate at the momment....

And there's allways better mileage in a misunderstanding...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Never drink tea.

Freak, freak!

Everybody look at the freak! Doesn't drink tea!

Ahem.

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

That is because they do evil things to tea leaves to make them into those horrible tasting brown things.

Roasting coffee beans on the other hand, all fine :-)

(la la, i'm sat in the sun in the garden and I can still see what i'm doing)

[venta.livejournal.com]

i'm sat in the sun in the garden

Oy, you're supposed to be working!

And yes, I know you're not, because I know perfectly well that the wireless gubbins isn't working on your work-laptop. So nyah :)

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

Except that
a) I fixed it so this is my work laptop
b) I'm off being ill. Too many plague monsters in the area.

Nice out here though :-)
And even better if I had been well today was going to be a working at home day so i could have been doing this anyway.

[venta.livejournal.com]

a) I fixed it so this is my work laptop

Oh, all right then :) Zandev implied that it was all doomed, doomed, doomed.

b) I'm off being ill.

Oh :( That's less good. Hope you stop it soon.

I'm not too healthy today either, but that's because bloody hayfever has set in. Bah. Hate summer.

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

It was quite doomed, the not booting properly was fun. Luckily all it really wanted was to be plugged back into some cables again and then I could fix it.

Try summer somewhere with different pollen. Africa say :-)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Try summer somewhere with different pollen. Africa say :-)

Er, yes. A cracking idea. After all, someone who can get sunstroke in Penrith is bound to be OK in Africa.

As well you know :)

Hayfever. Sunburn. Sunstroke. Midges. It started it, I tell you!

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

You just need to build up your resistance...
Or there is always the Cape in winter. Coincides nicely with summer :-)

gravel

[(Anonymous)]

No, not gall, very small kidney stones, of size to pass down urethra. OUCH