email forwarding/redirecting

oscarBravo

I'm really at a loss how to do this, so I'd appreciate any advice.

I'm temporarily in charge of relaying email to a boat off the coast of Russia. The boat has a slow-ass packet radio link, so they have to be choosy about what gets sent to them. They also have to avoid commercial mails as a condition of use of the (amateur radio) system.

This means that they can't publish their real email address, as people send silly HTML mails, photographs - all sorts of crap. That's where I come in: I receive the mail on a publicly available address, sanitise it, and forward it to the crew on their private address.

Here's the problem: they've asked me to change the way I do it so that the mail still appears to come from the original sender, as opposed to from me - this would make it easier to reply directly to the sender, instead of having to relay the replies through me also.[1] Sadly, I have no idea how to do that. I've used Mozilla Mail and Evolution, and neither give me the option of specifying a From: header other than the mail accounts I've created. Short of specifying Reply-to: (which is not what they've asked me to do) is there another way to do this?



[1] I've argued that this is a bad idea, as it would expose the private address to people who don't know the precautions they need to take, but hey: it's their radio link.

aphex™

I've used some webmail programs that do it. Not yahoo or hotmail, but ones like this. You could probably use that one, if you entered your mail server details correctly.

So you login and click compose, enter the to, as usual, but change the FROM to whatever u want (the original person wanting to contact these people). Input your SMTP server and u should be ok. Test it yourself first. I just sent one to myself from Bill@microsoft.com

You could simply TELNET into your SMTP server and type in the commands to send the email whatever way you want it, but it's a pain in the arse :dunno: Anyone can forge an email.
This is kinda the same thing though.

dahamsta

If you've access to a server have a look at Squirrelmail and the plugins. I think Bounce might do what you want, but I'm unsure of the behaviour these days.

http://www.squirrelmail.org/plugins.php

Failing that, try talking to the mailing list for SQ to see if someone could knock something together for you; and failing that try the same thing for TWIG.

http://www.informationgateway.org/

adam

leeroybrown

As Adam suggests, a decent mail client should have the facility to BOUNCE e-mail to an address. That way it will appear as if it still comes from the original sender.

oscarBravo

I've tried Evolution's "bounce" facility, but it doesn't allow me to edit the message in any way, which pretty much defeats the purpose. Mozilla mail doesn't seem to have a bounce function - I'll install Thunderbird and see if it has it.

leeroybrown

Alternatively, you could either set the "From: " header in your mailer to be the originating address.

oscarBravo

Originally posted by leeroybrown
Alternatively, you could either set the "From: " header in your mailer to be the originating address.

Evolution, Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird all restrict the From: header to accounts that I've set up in them.

Thunderbird has no bounce feature. Mutt can do what I need, but I'm having trouble getting it to talk to my imap server - "mutt -f imaps://user@server" doesn't work - "No such file or directory."

Adam, this is my problem for at most another week or so - not worthwhile getting anyone to hack anything. I've got squirrelmail on my IMAP server, but haven't got it working yet - I suspect it doesn't like the home-cooked SSL cert I'm using.

niallb

pine has both a bounce feature and good imap support.
Might be your easiest route.

NiallB

oscarBravo

Thanks for all the suggestions - I'm handing back responsibility shortly, so it's not my problem anymore!