Another common case involves people traveling. If you plug your laptop
into the network of a hotel or one of your consulting clients, you
might prefer to use an envelope and From header address at your home
systems instead of room1234(_at_)losangeles(_dot_)merriot(_dot_)com or
guest(_at_)example(_dot_)com(_dot_)
I'd like to understand this scenario better, as at present I am confused.
Among my confused thoughts are the following questions: What were the
steps that led to a mail address and mail server in my hotel room? Which
part of the hotel's policy forced me into that? Does any hotel actually
do this? In your understanding, which SMTP server is the STMP client on
my laptop talking to in order to send it's mail?
I would have expected instead that having got IP connectivity, my mail
reader on my laptop would have connected back to my normal home (e.g.:
pop3.mycompany.com/smtp.mycompany.com) and then sent and received mail
through there as usual, resulting in the normal From headers, etc.
Two separate questions there.
1. Yes, some hotels provide a mailserver and a guest email acount (for
example hotels using Neos products). Often these are send only accounts
(horrible concept, isn't it). However, the MUA in these cases is a machine
owned and managed by the hotel (at least in all cases I'm aware of) and not
the guest's laptop, and both the content From header and the envelope From
header will be as Vernon described.
2. Yes, hotels provide internet connectivity for guests laptops. When they
do so they usually expect the guest to connect to there normal mail
provider. This is a problem with providers that don't do authentication of
some sort, but not the hotel's problem so they've not much incentive to
solve it. Some do block port 25 so you have to use their outbound MTA, and
that writes a suitable Received From header identifying the room, but I
don't think these systems usually rewrite the envelope From address.
I haven't seen a case where the envelope From would identify the hotel room
when the sending MUA is the guest's laptop rather than the hotel's machine,
but I imagine this situation exists as suggested by Vernon. It's just a
variant of 2 above where the hotel's MTA does rewrite the envelope From.
Tom
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