Send emails with a custom From: field

Question

I'm really not into mail configuration, but somehow I managed to configure exim4 and it does send e-mails. I spent so many hours on it though I even can't count. (And I don't know why it is so complicated, while needs are usually very similar: to have e-mails addresses which should be used to actually send e-mails - and that's almost everything, not taking into account a security subject, which is mostly related to authentication).

When I'm sending e-mail, I have automatically set a FROM field as 'root' (linux user). I'd like to have a custom field (e.g. "Contact me"), and I couln't find on internet any answer how to do this.

Second, some say that using linux users as related to email addresses is not a good thing e.g.: http://t-machine.org/index.php/2014/06/27/webmail-on-your-debian-server-exim4-dovecot-roundcube/ But the tutorials I found use them. I'm not using data base as in the url above, but I would still prefer to have no linux user related to email - is it something difficult to achieve? How could I do this?

Here's /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf content:

# /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf
#
# Edit this file and /etc/mailname by hand and execute update-exim4.conf
# yourself or use 'dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config'
#
# Please note that this is _not_ a dpkg-conffile and that automatic changes
# to this file might happen. The code handling this will honor your local
# changes, so this is usually fine, but will break local schemes that mess
# around with multiple versions of the file.
#
# update-exim4.conf uses this file to determine variable values to generate
# exim configuration macros for the configuration file.
#
# Most settings found in here do have corresponding questions in the
# Debconf configuration, but not all of them.
#
# This is a Debian specific file

dc_eximconfig_configtype='internet'
dc_other_hostnames='url.com; mail.url.com; url; localhost;  localhost.localdomain'
dc_local_interfaces='127.0.0.1; my_ip'
dc_readhost=''
dc_relay_domains=''
dc_minimaldns='false'
dc_relay_nets=''
dc_smarthost=''
CFILEMODE='644'
dc_use_split_config='true'
dc_hide_mailname=''
dc_mailname_in_oh='true'
dc_localdelivery='maildir_home'

For any case, I substituted my domain with url and ip with my_ip.

And /etc/email-addresses is very short:

root: [email protected]

Answer 1

You need to tell mail the name you'd like to use (its currently looking it up in /etc/passwd, most likely). Of course, you could also change the user full name in /etc/passwd (e.g., via chfn -f 'New Name' user, and you really ought not be sending the mail as root!

For Heirloom mail, you can use either the from environment variable, its mailrc config file, or the -r option. Like one of these:

echo 'This is a test.' | mail -r 'Contact Me <root>' \ 
                              -s 'Testing' '[email protected]'   # using -r argument

# ... or ...

echo 'This is a test.' | from='Contact Me <root>' mail \
                              -s 'Testing' '[email protected]'   # env var 'email'

For other versions of mail, check their manpages.

Answer 2

The descriptive text in the From: address is taken from the password file. You can use the chfn command to change this. Try the command (change fullname and user ids as appropriate):

sudo chfn -f "Contact me" root

Ideally, you will have an alias for root in /etc/aliases specifying who should receive mail sent to root. This would likely be your userid, and any mail sent to root will be delivered to you mailbox.

Adding the same alias to /etc/email-addresses will change the address used in the From field. This should be a valid address as replies will be sent to this address.