Subject: Problems with bad header 'from'

From: "Bartosz Klimek" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 12:17:37 +0200

Hello.

We are having problems with messages that have bad 'from' field in the
header. Sometimes our smtp server receives a message with a 'from' that
looks like this:

From: "John Smith"

There's no e-mail address. We don't know why it happens, but this is a
different matter.

Router processes such a field and produces:

From: "John Smith"@internal.hostname

While it seems to be a correct behaviour, it is very problematic for our
employees. Is there an easy way to make the router to replace the invalid
'from' field with the 'from' e-mail address from the envelope?

Thanks for any help.

Regards,

--
Bartosz Klimek, Onet.pl S.A.

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe zmailer" in
the body of a message to [email-masked]

---

From: Arnt Gulbrandsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 18:30:06 +0530

Bartosz Klimek <[email-masked]>
> 'from' field with the 'from' e-mail address from the envelope?

Not that I know about. However, I would be very cautious about doing that.

Suppose that the From field is illegal, and that the envelope from and
the Reply-To field differ. What should the router do? (Yes, I've seen
cases where both would be the "right" choice.)

Or even better: There's a Sender field, and it too is different. What
should the router guess?

My personal choice would probably be to bounce the message. If you can't
deal with a message reasonably, an error message for the sender is a
respectable solution.

--Arnt
-