On Wed 27 Apr 2022 at 08:05:46 (-0400), Haines Brown wrote: > David. thanks for hanging in with me! > > On Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 03:23:17PM -0500, David Wright wrote: > > > Do you know why mutt is adding a Sender: line to your emails? > > Did you ask it to, or have you been asked to by someone else? > > No, I didn't ask mutt to add a Sender: line and I do not know what > evidence there it that it is doing so.
OK. So I would drop all conversation about a "Sender: line". You are the sender, the person who drops the letter in the blue box on the street. The headers that are relevant are "from" headers, "From:" in the email and "MAIL FROM" in the envelope. So all these error messages that talk about a missing "sender" are just using the agent, you, in place of the preposition, from. The lines which principally concern you/your system are: 1) The EHLO line, which you typically don't see, is read from /etc/mailname by exim, is set to lenin.histomat.net, and works. You set it early in the debian-installer, if Devuan follows along the same path. You confirmed it immediately after you told exim "mail sent by smarthost; … … ", on the next screen (again, if Devuan follows). 2) Your address for authentication with the smarthost, which appears to be mail.guardedhost.com. So you've put a line like: mail.guardedhost.com:bro...@historicalmaterialism.info:some-secret into /etc/exim4/passwd.client, and that's working. 3) The From: field in the email header. You're responsible for writing that, and it will usually be a globally valid email address that someone replying to you would use as their To: address. I think you're using exim's rewrite facility to change local addresses to, eg hai...@histomat.net (you're logged in as haines) and r...@histomat.net (popcon apparently runs as root). I don't suppose survey@popcon ever replies to the latter address, but I assume that people email you at the former address. Whatever histomat.net runs could be checking that usernames are registered in some way, but often that's not the case—my own domain places no limits on the left side of the @. 4) The MAIL FROM address, which is the one that you're having trouble with. It has to be set, and it has to be acceptable to the people who run the submission port on mail.guardedhost.com. It doesn't have to bear any relationship to your machine's name, nor the From: address in the email itself. It's often something that you paid good money for, and frequently resembles any email address that's used for authentication, like your bro...@historicalmaterialism.info address. It could relate to any domain you buy, or to any ISP you connect to. > If I understand correctly, which is always in serious doubt, it is > exim that constructs the Sender: line by combining /etc/mailname and > $LOCALHOST. Is this so? Already deconstructed in the thread. > Understood. But my impression is not that there is no Sender: field, > but that it is empty (<>). The MAIL FROM was empty. > However I'm not clear whether the field is empthy or that what us > in it field is not owned by me. I have popcorn installed, and it has > root send a priodidic message. Ah, presumably these are the messages that were failing when you wrote the OP. > The mail server does not recognize > the root@histomat[].net address. It sends me this message: > > A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its > recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: > > sur...@popcon.devuan.org > host mail.guardedhost.com [216.239.133.245] > SMTP error from remote mail server after pipelined sending data block: > 553 5.7.1 <r...@histomat.net>: Sender address rejected: > not owned by user bro...@historicalmaterialism.info That's a different error, 553, not 554, and being sent from the destination. > The address hai...@histomat.net is owned by > bro...@historicalmaterialism.info. Omnis mail server never had a > problem with r...@histomat.net before. The recipient might be testing r...@histomat.net to see if it can send mail to it. It does this by starting a transaction (that never gets completed). debian-user does this at least since August 2020, and it can be a bit of pain. > > A typical, straightforward, email contains a From: field, which is the > > email address of the sender (not Sender), as opposed to the recipient > > (ie the To: field). Again, typically, straightforwardly, the From: > > and To: fields will be used to generate the envelope's MAIL FROM > > and RCPT TO addresses. > > Are you saying that the envelope hss MAIL FROM and RCPT TO lines and a > typical email has From: and To: lines? Yes, just like a letter. > Does this leave it to mutt to construct the Sender: line? No "Sender:" line. Mutt constructs the envelope from the From: and To: but with any extra rules in your configuration, as we have discussed. > > You have to tell mutt what to use. It can't assume that your $LOGNAME > > and /etc/mailname are, taken together, going to generate a satisfactory > > From: field for an email. > > And yet it has access to those values. Or should /etc/mailname be > histomat.net rather tnan lenin.histomat.net? It only knows what you tell it. And lenin.histomat.net is OK there. > > What did Omnis actually say, literally? > > > > In your OP, you wrote "554 5.7.1 Empty Sender Address > > is prohibited through this server; from=<>" > > > (Should I guess that that's Omnis speaking?) > > Yes > > > I have assumed that "554 5.7.1 Empty Sender Address" is the actual > > response, and it's capitalised, whereas "is prohibited through this > > server" is their gloss, uncapitalised. So I don't think it's saying > > anything about a Sender: field, rather, the MAIL FROM address. > > Oh! This hadn't occurred to me. The MAIL FROM belongs to the envelope. > > > Well, the simple way, which is why I use it, is to put: > > > > set envelope_from_address="someuser@somedomain" > > set use_envelope_from > > > > into mutt's configuration file (always assuming it gets read!), as > > I wrote before. (At this point, I didn't have an inkling of Sender: > > being involved, and hope that is still true.) > > I checked, and the muttrc does get read. I put these two lines into > it: > > set envelope_from_address="hai...@histomat.net" > set use_envelope_from > > If these take immediae effect (without restarting mutt), then they did > not help. No, mutt only reads its configuration when you start it. And exim is similar (dpkg-reconfigure does this for you, of course). > The online email testing utility still returns: > > Unverified address: postoffice.omnis.com said: 521 5.5.1 Protocol error  > Error in communication with postoffice.omnis.com > > What happened to the objection raised by someone tnat the these lines > should have a binary value? Only use_envelope_from is boolean (of the two envelope variables). set envelope_from_address obviously needs an address (or empty). > It strikes me that the addition of these lines are just a work around > for the problem that the envelopoe's MAIL FROM line is > unacceptable. Yes, but I now suspect that your problem might only have arisen with the system's emails, and not yours (ie mutt's). I would need confirmation of that, as you haven't spelled out which emails fail and which don't. > > The reason /I/ have to do that is that submission to my ISP requires > > an email address belonging to them. I've never used my ISP's email > > system beyond logging in to it every so long to prevent it expiring. > > Seems like my own situation. Well I thought you'd made some linkage between omnis (looks like your ISP) and bro...@historicalmaterialism.info (looks like your domain). My domain is hosted 4000 miles from my ISP in a different country. > > > In exim configuration I hide outgoing local mail name and provide > > > the domain name without prepending host name. I assume > > > this is irrevant and is merley a cosmetic isaue. Is that so? > > > > If it's an email address, it shouldn't cause a problem. I'm assuming > > that you're doing away with lenin, so to speak, which is probably > > the correct thing to do, as I'm guessing that you don't run a mail > > server on lenin. > > Emacs configuration first asks whether to hide the visible domain > name. I answer Yes, and so it asks what that name should be. I enter > histomat.net. But above you say "an email addess". Did you mean just > the domain portion of an address? > > > Summary: tell mutt who you are. And note that "Sender" gets one very > > trivial mention in mutt's manual (for tagging emails containing such). > > I gather that the two lines above inserted into muttrc should tell > mutt who I am. But why out of the blue have they become necessary? And > without restarting anything they don't keep the online email tester > from saying that hai...@histomat.net violates Protocol 521.5.5.1. I don't know why you're suddenly sending blank FROMs. That would depend on your answers. As for those rejected at the destination, that might be down to them changing the checks they make on incoming mail. That's something that people are tightening up on all the time. Oh for the good old days! If push comes to shove, AIUI you can force exim to write a fixed MAIL FROM on outgoing emails with its -f option, which you'd set in /etc/default/exim4. But there may be easier ways. I don't think it's very straightforward to configure Debian's exim to send users' and system's emails when the user is also trying to manipulate their address as well. And it gets really hairy if you want to be able to send and receive emails between machines on the home LAN as well. PS I can't keep up with some of this thread. Cheers, David.
