Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!utkcs2!CYGNUSX1.CS.UTK.EDU!moore
From: moore@CYGNUSX1.CS.UTK.EDU (Keith Moore)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers
Subject: Re: DEC Mail-11 & headers
Message-ID: <979@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu>
Date: 4 Jul 89 22:10:39 GMT
References: <5217@mtgzz.att.com>
Sender: news@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu
Reply-To: moore@UTKCS2.CS.UTK.EDU (Keith Moore)
Organization: CS Dept -- University of TN, Knoxville
Lines: 31

In article <5217@mtgzz.att.com> davis@mtgzz.UUCP (p.a.davis) writes:
>Are there any opinions, informed or otherwise, concerning DEC's
>Mail-11 protocol and its refusal to handle non-VMSmail headers ?

Mail-11 and VMS MAIL are toys.

It's a royal pain to have to translate from MAIL-11 to "real" mail
protocols, but this is because VMS MAIL was never designed to talk
to anything but other VMS MAIL (or very similar) programs.

>I find it infuriating to have mail with a reply-to routed through
>a VAX running a Mail-11 gateway system, only to hear from the
>recipient that the reply-to has been "excised" from the header,
>and now, as far as RFC???-compliant mailers are concerned, is
>actually part of the message ? 

Some SMTP-to-MAIL-11 gateway programs scan the RFC822 headers to 
determine the "best" reply-to address, and insert that address in
the MAIL-11 "From" line, so replies go to the correct addresss.
(PMDF does this, and so does my mail-11 gateway for UNIX systems.)

>Does anyone know if DEC plan to
>do anything about this appallingly parochial approach before X.400 ?

I'm sure your DEC customer relations person will tell you that they
have done something about the problem, and it's called "Mailbus".
--
Keith Moore			Internet: moore@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu
University of Tenn. CS Dept.	BITNET: moore@utkvx
107 Ayres Hall, UT Campus	UT Decnet: utkcs2::moore
Knoxville Tennessee 37996-1301	Telephone: +1 615 974 0822