R sendmail option

[Matt Landau]

Oops, botched that one.

What the "R" option REALLY seems to do is automatically route mail through
a central (smarter) mail server.  The notion seems to be that you have one
mail gateway that's real smart, and everyone else just passes mail off to
it instead of figuring out how to do delivery for themselves.  

Many people write sendmail.cf files to do this already, but the "R" option
seems to make it automatic.  I suppose it probably also arranges for all
outgoing mail to look like it comes from "user at mail-gateway" instead of
"user at diskless-client".  That's another thing we already do with our
sendmail.cf's, but doing it automagically is nicer.

The default mail gateway seems to be whatever machine you get your
/var/spool/mail from, based on the theory that that's where you want to
mail to seem to originate.  Makes sense, actually.

[Bill...could you please pull my last, bogus, response to this item
before it goes out in Sun-Spots?  I'd rather not look quite that stupid
in this forum.  Let's save Guy the trouble of jumping all over my 
mistake :-)]
--
 Matt Landau		    		Rebel without a clue.
 mlandau at bbn.com