Every message you send will have a header field labelled From that shows your electronic mail address. The people who receive your mail can tell from it who sent the message and how to address replies. MM allows you to customize the information or redirect replies.
The information in the From field typically contains two items, your real name and your electronic mail address. Both come from the file /etc/passwd.
From: Joseph Brennan <jb51@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
You may prefer the first part, your real name, (Joseph Brennan in the example) to appear differently in the messages you send. Perhaps you are better known by a middle name or nickname. The name part does not even have to be your name, although something like The Great One doesn't help anyone understand who the mail is from.
To change the name part, set the variable personal-name to any name you like, and save the change with save-init. To undo, type set personal-name with nothing following it, and save-init again to save the change. Here, Joseph Brennan changes his name to Joe Brennan.
MM>set personal-name Joe Brennan MM>save-init
You may also change the entire From field. One practical reason might be to send a message on behalf of someone else; put that person's name in the From field to show who the message is really from, since it is different from the person who actually sent it.
To change the From field for a particular message, use the from command at the S> prompt; to change it for all messages, reset the variable default-from. In both cases, MM will put the usual From field information into a Reply-to header field. If the From field you create does not match your address, MM will also create a Sender field with your address when the message is sent.
S>display headers From: Joseph Brennan <jb51@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> To: fb2 Cc: mm33, hk12 Subject: Meeting on Sept 21 S>from Joe S>display headers From: Joe To: fb2 Cc: mm33, hk12 Subject: Meeting on Sept 21 Reply-to: Joseph Brennan <jb51@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> S>
In this example, the new From field does not contain the sender's address, so a Sender field will be created, but it is not shown with display. You can remove or modify the Reply-to field but you cannot change the Sender field. The reason it was set up this way is to ensure that every message sent shows somewhere in it who really sent it.
To put your customized From field in all messages you send, type set default-from and the content you want, and then save-init to save it. To undo, type set default-from with nothing after it, and then save-init to save the change. Consider, though, whether the personal-name variable (see above) is what you really want.
The header field Reply-to contains an address for replies. Replies go to the address in the Reply-to field when it exists (instead of the address in the Sender or From lines).
You can insert or change the Reply-to field in any message to deliberately direct replies to another address. There are various reasons you might want to do that; for example, you might be working with a group of people and want replies to go to the whole group or to someone else in the group.
S>reply-to abc6 S>d h From: Joseph Brennan <jb51@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> To: fb2 Cc: mm33, hk12 Subject: Meeting on Sept 21 Reply-to: abc6 S>
You can remove any reply-to line with the command erase reply-to.
If you have more than one address, you might prefer all replies to go to one place. Use the variable default-reply-to: type set default-reply-to followed by the address for replies, and then save-init to save it. To undo, type set default-reply-to with nothing else, and save-init to save the change. (If you have already forwarded mail delivery to another address, you don't need to use a reply-to field.)