[143] in Release_7.7_team
FYI: mh
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dorothy Bowe)
Mon Aug 1 09:56:44 1994
To: release-77@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To:
Date: Mon, 01 Aug 1994 09:56:31 EDT
From: Dorothy Bowe <dot@MIT.EDU>
Late on Friday, we discovered a non-trivial "feature" of MH 6.8. (I say
feature because it appears to be done this way purposefully.) MH 6.8
wants you to have a full name when you send email, and it searches three
places for this name:
o the SIGNATURE environment variable
o the signature field of your .mh-profile
o the gecos field of your password entry
This means that if the first two are not set, MH will use whatever is
set in your password entry (i.e., the information which shows up with
you finger @athena). This did not happen under the earlier version, and
means that some people who have customized their finger information will
have unexpected information show up in this field.
The interesting part is that this is broken on the Suns. We know the
problem does exist on DECstations and are currently investigating the
IBMs. We also have a fix which will be applied at the first patch
release, but until then, this condition will exist on the DECstation.
As a short term work-around, individuals may set the environment variable
SIGNATURE to the null string:
setenv SIGNATURE ""
