Three Dialnet Questions

[rsl@MAX-FLEISCHER.SF.Dialnet.ILA.COM (Richard Lamson)]

    Date: Mon, 6 May 91 21:22 MDT
    From: Paul Cross <paul@persephone.aegean-sea.dialnet.symbolics.com>

	Date: Mon, 6 May 91 16:56 PDT
	From: rsl@MAX-FLEISCHER.SF.Dialnet.ILA.COM (Richard Lamson)

	    Date: Mon, 6 May 91 12:45 MDT
	    From: paul@aegean-sea.dialnet.symbolics.com (Paul Cross)

	    3) Does anyone have a fix so that people who use dialnet get proper
	    e-mail return addresses without adding a reply-to field?  I have not yet
	    reported it to Symbolics, and it may be fixed in ECOs beyond 8.0.  Note
	    how my return address drops the host field.  My return address ought to
	    read paul@persephone.aegean-sea.dialnet.symbolics.com but is
	    paul@aegean-sea.dialnet.symbolics.com instead.

	Some things to look at:
[...]
	If your host's :MAIL-NAME is wrong, you should delete its Internet Domain Name
	attribute in the namespace editor (shift-mouse-middle on the item, I think).

    Removing the host's Internet Domain Name attribute makes 
      (send net:*local-host* :mail-name) 
    return the right thing.  I'll pass this on to fellow Dialnetters who
    have been experiencing the same problem.  By your response I'm assuming
    that I don't need to specify explicitly an Internet Domain Name
    attribute for my domain server to work, since you told me to remove the
    attribute rather than correct it.  

Yes.  The default for :MAIL-NAME is to append the Internet Domain Name of your
site to the primary name of the host (with a period between).  The IDN
attribute for hosts was provided to override this sensible default (e.g., our
machine at ILA is called "Meillet", but it wants to be known to the outside
world as "ILA.COM", not "Meillet.ILA.COM").  If you wanted to control the exact
name or appearance of your host's name, (e.g., you like all-lower-case), you
could override the default.  Of course, any mail that has been passed through a
Unix host is likely to have its host names lower-cased anyway.

I'm curious why you send mail with addresses that all read "foo%bar@Riverside..."
Does this mean your mailer doesn't automatically forward mail to Riverside and
that you massage it by hand, or does some host along the path do that massaging
automagically?  If the former, you may want to fix up your domain files to
specify that all domains pass through Riverside unless you specify otherwise.
There is a patch available from SLUG which does this (I don't have it, because I
use a slightly different one I wrote before the official one was written), so all
you would need to do would be to add a line or two to your domain files.  Of
course, if you are not yet using Domain files, this is somewhat more complicated.