[wellylug] sendmail - enough for today!

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <v2jgkvkrm5155tshk7lq6vclb6ar38dp3k at 4ax.com>, Enkidu writes:
>If you have in your hosts file the following
>
><yourIPaddr> localhost.localdomain localhost mercury venus mars
>
>then this associates your IP address with the *names*:  [...]

More relevantly (for the context in which we are discussing this), it
says that the official, fully qualified, version of the names
"localhost", "mercury", "venus", "mars" is "localhost.localdomain".

Which is where sendmail is getting "localhost.localdomain" from, and
using it.

Running your own MTA (mail transport agent, like sendmail) without a
"real" (permanent) domain name is problematic as we've seen.  

Email programs like Evolution (and most Windows email programs) avoid
this by only using a remote email server for both sending and receiving.

I don't use mutt often enough to know if it can be configured to only
ever talk to a remote mail server (MTA).  I also don't know if that
would have undesirable side effects (eg, causing a modem to dial out
frequently -- Windows mail clients typically require express user action
to send/receive mail, at least by default, to avoid this).

In answer to the rest of Persian's question the most appropriate way to
get persian13 at ihug.co.nz into the From line would be to (a) add your
user as a sendmail trusted user for overriding the From line, and (b)
configure mutt to do that.  IIRC the instructions I mentioned earlier
are sufficient to do that.  (And AFAICT the "lyndsay at ihug.co.nz" result
is due mainly to setting /etc/mailname.)

Ewen