Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!gatech!utkcs2!betelgeuse!moore
From: moore@betelgeuse.cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Ultrix 3.1,getting rid of >"< can it be done ?
Message-ID: <1157@utkcs2.cs.utk.edu>
Date: 14 Oct 89 06:27:56 GMT
References: <1634.252b15c7@esat.kuleuven.ac.be>
Reply-To: moore@cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore)
Organization: CS Dept -- University of TN, Knoxville
Lines: 59

In article <1634.252b15c7@esat.kuleuven.ac.be> elsen@esat.kuleuven.ac.be writes:
>
> - We are using our Ultrix 3.1 MicrovaxII as a major Gateway between a
>local campus DECnet network (consisting mainly of VMS hosts) and the
>outside world with respect to e-mail (and Usenet news).
>
>  User's on the VMS side can send e-mail using a syntax like
>  ULTRIX-GATEWAY::"e-mail-address"   in VMS Mail.
>
>  Now to the outside world however we would like to hide the fact
>  that this Ultrix Gateway was used in order to send this mail i.e:
>  we would like this To address to appear to it's recipient just like :
> 
>           e-mail-address        # without any quotes in it !
[...]
> I'd be very interesting to know (having spend lot's of hours into this one)
> whether there's any way at all to get rid of the quotes as well! 
>-- 
>  Marc Elsen (System Manager/Software Engineer)
>  Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
[...]
>               EMAIL : elsen@esat.kuleuven.ac.be

I attacked this problem once and never found a way to do this with sendmail,
precisely because sendmail's tokenizer treats (correctly, I think)
quoted strings a single tokens.  It would be nice if sendmail had
a way to match a quoted string on the left hand side of a rewrite rule
and ways to unquote a quoted string and to intelligently quote a series 
of tokens on the right hand side.  

There are lots of problems with converting the VMS MAIL To: header to an 
RFC822 To: header -- many VMS MAIL addresses are syntactally incorrect 
in the RFC822 world, and there's no guarantee that even the simple 
single-token addresses in the To: line are actually valid names for mail 
recipients -- they could be VMS logical names used as mail aliases.  
(Just imagine what an RFC822 mail program does when trying to reply to all 
recipients of a message that has a header like: To: @device:filename.ext)

So I wrote my own VMS MAIL gateway program to replace DEC's mail11dv3.  
It uses MAIL-11 envelope addresses (not header addresses) to generate 
an RFC822-compliant To: header, removing unnecessary quoting characters 
in the process.  For mail sent from the VMS system through the gateway
the effect is exactly as you describe, e.g., mail to 
UTKCS::"moore@betelgeuse.cs.utk.edu" will show up on betelgeuse.cs.utk.edu
as being addressed to simply moore@betelgeuse.cs.utk.edu .
It also converts return addresses into domain names if you wish --
so mail from DECnet address UTKVX::USER appears as from user@utkvx.utk.edu .

Anyway, if you want it, it is available for anonymous ftp from
cs.utk.edu (128.169.201.1), directory readonly/mail11, files
mail11d.shar (this is the incoming mail-11 gateway), and
mail11.shar (this is the outgoing mail-11 gateway).  Let me know
if you don't have ftp access and I'll mail them to you.


Keith Moore			Internet: moore@cs.utk.edu
University of Tenn. CS Dept.	BITNET: moore@utkvx
107 Ayres Hall, UT Campus	UT Decnet: utkcs::moore
Knoxville Tennessee 37996-1301	Telephone: +1 615 974 0822