Re: [Exim] Newbie: Return-Path

Top Page
Delete this message
Reply to this message
Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: Tyrone Watt
CC: Exim Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Exim] Newbie: Return-Path
On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Tyrone Watt wrote:

> I have written a web-based email type program, All mail is sent by httpd
> which is run as nobody. Problem is that is the mail is sent to a non
> existing user it gets returned to nobody. In the message I am sending to
> exim I set the the lines 'Return-Path' and 'Errors-To', but exim seems to
> strip these. I have tried setting return_path_add to false, and some other
> things from the manual, but I don't know if I'm even typing these lines in
> the right place in the config. Nothing I do in the config file seems to make
> much difference. I am running Redhat 6


Return-path: headers are things that get added to messages *as they are
delivered into mailboxes*, to record the envelope sender address. They
should not be present in messages en route, and Exim removes them by
default (see return_path_remove - a look at the manual's index would
have found this).

What you want to do is to set the envelope sender of your messages. To
do this you should

(a) set trusted_users = nobody so that the nobody user is permitted to
specify senders other than itself (personally, I'd use some other user
name for this job).

(b) get your program to specify the sender address using the -f command
line option when it calls Exim, or get it to stick a "From " line at the
front. (That's "From" followed by a space, followed by data in the form
used by UUCP and to separate messages in Berkeley-style mailboxes, *not*
the "From:" header line.)

Hmm. There is a great need for an "Intro to email" text, isn't there?

-- 
Philip Hazel            University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@???      Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.