On Tue, 22 Jun 2021, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
> Eduardo Chappa <
cha...@washington.edu> wrote:
>
>> As far as I understand Gmail rewrites the from field if it does not match
>> the one you are allowed to send from.
>
>> Alpine was designed to be used for students/faculty/staff at the
>> University of Washington, not for people in their personal computers. At
>> that time everyone had an email addres given by
>> ${
LOGNAME}@u.washington.edu, and this made it easy to set up Pine in
>> computers at the University. This decision shows the age of Alpine, and it
>> does not apply to the current needs of users.
>
>> Alpine needs to be updated to conform to more modern needs, and the use of
>> a user-id might change because of this.
>
> My account originated as dialup to a Unix host. pine 2.X was one of the
> mailers offered. I now SSH to the host; alpine is one of the mailers
> offered. Lots of linux distributions with alpine packages have been
> compiled with ALLOW CHANGING FROM for decades, going back to pine days
> as well.
Yes, but that is not the point here. It is reasonable to assume that your
version of Alpine was compiled with that option, and in that case, using
Customizied-hdrs and roles is the way to change the from field from the
default which uses your user-id.
> If you finally remove the restriction by default, you should probably
> have a configuration option in there in case some system administrator
> thinks it's a better way to manage corporate or institutional mail
> accounts. There must be some corporate email that isn't using [spit]
> Microsoft Outlook.
No, there is no way I will be removing any option from Alpine, less this
one which is the one that allows you to configure your other email
accounts.
> I would still leave the user name (left of @) equivalent to the account
> name by default, with the user able to change it with an environment
> variable or within .pinerc. It's tradition.
That is not going to go, but will probably become obsolete. It is very
unlikely that your login name is the same as your user name in any of your
accounts (I am not talking about you, I am talking about a generic you).
For example, at work my user name is "chappa", but in my personal laptop
is "echappa". Only the second one is used as the username for my work
account, but none of them match my gmail, gmx, outlook and yahoo accounts.
In other words, the user-id as a way to create an email address is not
correct for most needs of users today, and has a limited value.
I will make some changes to Alpine to make the user-id obsolete while not
eliminating it and preserving its full functionality.