Subject: Problems with the Pine personal-name datum

From: Stewart Dean <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2000 17:18:28 -0400

Background:===================================
We use an old level (3.95) of Pine on our UNIX/AIX IMAP mail server.  We
have had it around a long time.  At this point about a fifth of our
users use as a legacy app after telenting in, while most new users use
Netscape Messenger.  There are some situations where Pine is preferable.

The Problem:===================================
We are looking to be able to serve various application requirements
through web-based apps.  We need to be able to uniquely identify the
user and be able to associate him or her to the college's Banner
administrative system/database.
Recently we made a change to the gecos field in the Unix passwd file to
add the Banner key.  Checking the various documentation for mail,
sendmail and Netscape Messenger, I found that they will treat 
	a forward slash
	a percent sign
as a delimiter and ignore the delimiter and anything after it when
determining the the user name to put in the From: (sender) field.  I
chose to use a percent sign because a forward slash had some unwanted
side effects (follwing text ended up as the Plan) 

Thus a passwd file line that might have looked like this: 
geoburnssdean:George Burns:/home/igeoburns:/bin/ksh
was changed to:
geoburnssdean:George Burns%00661685:/home/geoburns:/bin/ksh

This worked fine in almost all respects....except that the personal name
datum
in our Pine 3.95 ends up as:
personal-name            = <Value is Fixed: using "George
Burns%00661685">

Apparently, Pine doesn't observe the delimiter convention and thus the
key and the percent sign delimter ends up in the Sender field.  Is there
anything to be done about this?

My thanks in advance for your assistance.........
--
Stewart Dean, Unix System Admin, Henderson Computer Resources 
Center of Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York  12504  
[email-masked]  voice: 914-758-7475, fax: 914-758-7035
-- 
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