Goofy mh problem

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (jc at trillian.mit.edu)]

Hi; me again.  It occurs to  me  that  maybe  someone  here  will  be
familiar  with the mh mailer, and might have a solution to one of the
silliest email problems I've seen yet (and I've seen a lot of  them).
I thought I'd give mh a try, after not using it for years, since it's
now available on linux and bsd systems and seems to basically work.

However, when I started using mh  on  this  machine,  something  that
rapidly  came to my attention was that a lot of people couldn't reply
to my messages.  The reason turned out to  be  that  it  was  sending
messages out with the header line like:
   From: <jc at trillian.mit.edu>, <jc at localhost>
   From: John Chambers <jc at localhost.mit.edu>
In test that I've done sending myself messages,  I've  seen  both  of
these.   Needless  to say, jc at localhost is of little use to people on
other machines, and jc at localhost.mit.edu simply bounces.   The  first
example  seems  to  work  with  most Unix-type mailers, but Microsoft
mailers discard the first address and use the second one.  Duh!

One of the funny cases is that when mediaone users try  to  reply  to
this,  their  mail  servers know how to deliver it, to someone called
"jc" in their own system.  He knows about me and has forwarded  me  a
few  messages,  but  I'd rather not bother him with messages intended
for me.

Anyhow, several people who have used mh have told me  that  they  are
sure  there's  a  simple  way  to  configure mh to send out the right
return address.  Unfortunately, while they insist that  it's  simple,
they  can't  actually tell me how to do it.  Something that you can't
type isn't all that useful, no matter how simple it is.  We've  spent
far too much time grovelling around in TFM pages, and not finding it.

Anyone know?  Or should I just dismiss mh as not usable yet?

(Funny thing is, on this machine, the /usr/bin/mail command does  the
same thing.  But the hostname and uname commands give the correct DNS
name for this machine.  Why both of these  mailers  do  something  so
bogus  is a real mystery.  One of our linux machines at work does the
same thing, and nobody there can diagnose it, either.  We have had  a
couple  of  comments that soon the pwd command will start saying just
".", which is of course absolutely true.  ;-)

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