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

[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. :)