Caps with sendmail

[Chris P]

Thanks!  I'll give it all a try..
C.


On Tue, 20 May 2003, Matthew Seaman wrote:

> On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 12:00:24AM -0700, Chris P wrote:
> >
> > I have 1 user that really prefers capital's for his account name.  Only
> > problem is email to that account does not seem to work.  Does anyone know
> > if sendmail has issues with capitals?   When anyone emails that account,
> > my machine replies with "user unknown".  I've tried setting aliases, and
> > everything I can think of.. Nothing gets through to that account.
> >
> > Any ideas?  Not a real big deal.. Just would be nice to know.
> >
> > It was both on FreeBSD 4.8 and 5.0
>
> Putting capital letters into Unix usernames is generally not
> recommended --- as you've found out, sendmail will convert the name to
> lowercase before trying to look it up in the password database.
> That's not just sendmail being annoying: it does that because the
> standards say that e-mail addressing should be case insensitive.  You
> can get round it with sendmail, but it may cause you grief in other
> ways and with other software packages.
>
> Here's a suggestion: you can give your user a lower case username but
> a capitalised e-mail address fairly easily.  Look at
> /usr/share/sendmail/cf/README, in particular the sections about
> genericstable and virtusertable.  In a nutshell, you add:
>
>     FEATURE(genericstable, `hash -o /etc/mail/genericstable')dnl
>     GENERICS_DOMAIN(`your.domain.name.here')dnl
>
> to your /etc/mail/`hostname`.mc and say, put in a line:
>
>     fred Fred.Bloggs
>
> into the /etc/mail/genericstable file -- this controls the conversion
> fred at your.domain.name.here -> Fred.Bloggs at your.domain.name.here on the
> outgoing mail.
>
> For incoming e-mail, you either need to use an alias:
>
>     Fred.Blogs:  fred
>
> or the equivalent in /etc/mail/virtusertable --- I wouldn't bother
> with virtusertable unless you're running a complicated mail system
> serving e-mail for several domains.
>
> Otherwise, if you really, really must have your user with uppercase
> letters in their username, then you need to add 'u' to the local
> mailer flags.  In /etc/mail/`hostname`.mc add:
>
>     MODIFY_MAILER_FLAGS(`LOCAL', `+u')dnl
>
> 	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
>