Name
OldStyleHeaders
Synopsis
In pre-RFC821 days, lists of recipients were commonly space-delimited; that is, the list:
hans christian andersen
was considered a list of three mail recipients, rather than a single, three-part name. Currently, individual recipient names must be delimited with commas, and internal spaces must be quoted. That is:
hans,christian,andersen ← three recipients "hans christian andersen" ← a single three-part name hans christian andersen← illegal
Because some users and some old programs still delimit recipient
lists with spaces, the OldStyleHeaders
option can
be used to tell sendmail to internally convert
those spaces to commas.
The forms of the OldStyleHeaders
option are as
follows:
O OldStyleHeaders=bool ← configuration file (V8.7 and later) -OOldStyleHeaders=bool ← command line (V8.7 and later) define(`confOLD_STYLE_HEADERS',bool) ← mc configuration (V8.7 and later) Oobool ← configuration file (deprecated) -oobool← command line (deprecated)
The argument bool
is of type
Boolean. If that argument is missing, the
default value is true, and unquoted spaces in an address are
converted to commas. The default when configuring with the
mc technique is true. If the entire
OldStyleHeaders
option is missing, it defaults to
false, and unquoted spaces are converted to the character defined by
the BlankSub
option (BlankSub).
The sendmail program is somewhat adaptive about commas. When first examining a list of addresses, it looks to see whether one of the following four ...
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