Re: sendmail newbie question

From: Matthew Seaman (m.seaman_at_infracaninophile.co.uk)
Date: 11/30/03

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    Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2003 17:31:48 +0000
To: Marty Landman <MLandman@face2interface.com>

    On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 11:48:18AM -0500, Marty Landman wrote:

    > >However on unix systems, user 'Marty' is not
    > >automatically the same as user 'marty' or as user 'MARTY'.
     
    > If I understand correctly you're saying that by and large, modern Unix
    > systems are case sensitive but since email is not the mailbox name e.g.
    > 'Marty' is converted to lower case at some point in processing even if
    > mixed case is used by the person sending the email properly wrt the
    > server's config it will still fail unless everything's all lower case
    > because of the case conversion done behind the scenes?

    Correct -- although Unix has been case sensitive since way back.

    > >It is possible to set up sendmail to preserve the case of usernames
    > >but doing so would mean your mail system wouldn't be standards
    > >compliant, so I'll keep quiet on the issue -- unless anyone really
    > >does have a burning desire to know how?
    >
    > Not me, because that would mean Marty@localhost would be a different
    > address than marty@localhost, right? I have to agree that this is not imo a
    > good thing.

    As I said above, trying to make your username mixed case will give you
    grief with e-mail. However, it's pretty easy to have an all lower
    case username and make your e-mail address appear in whatever case you
    want, so long as the system can map them back to your username in
    order to do final delivery.

    For sendmail, you'ld use genericstable to do the username -> e-mail
    address translation on the outgoing messages and either aliases or
    virtusertable to translate e-mail address -> username on the incoming
    stuff.

    Just add:

    FEATURE(genericstable, `hash -o /etc/mail/genericstable')dnl

    to your /etc/mail/`hostname`.mc (assuming you're starting by copying
    /etc/mail/freebsd.mc, which already has virtusertable enabled).

    Then create a file /etc/mail/genericstable containing:

        marty Marty

    (LHS is the username, RHS is the e-mail address: you can use the fully
    qualified Marty@Example.com style if you want, or
    M.Landman@WhereEver.ORG).

    See aliases(5) for the syntax of the aliases file. virtusertable is
    just like genericstable except the columns are reversed and the e-mail
    address has to have an @... part:

        Marty@Example.com marty

    Then run:

        # cd /etc/mail
        # make
        # make install
        # make restart-mta

            Cheers,

            Matthew 

    -- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       26 The Paddocks
                                                      Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614                                  Bucks., SL7 1TH UK

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