Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!wang!fitz From: fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: is uunet breaking your headers? Message-ID: Date: 1 Jun 90 02:19:17 GMT References: <2752.26638923@mccall.com> Organization: Wang Labs, Lowell MA, USA Lines: 75 karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu writes: > [2] I see that rewrites of domainisms into !-paths for the benefit of > UUCP sites are protested. I disagree with the protest. I count on > the following transform always working, for which I have yet to find a > failure case: > anything@proper.domain.name <=> proper.domain.name!anything Well, I get shitloads of failure cases here. If everyone on the Internet had your sendmail.cf, you're right, nothing would go wrong. But when you send out a message with: From: proper.domain.name!anything as it goes through sites with different opinions about sendmail.cf, it will slowly turn into: From: proper.domain.name!anything@relay.site From: anything%proper.domain.name@relay.site From: relay.site!anything%proper.domain.name From: relay.site!anything%proper.domain.name@next.relay and will become useless. Even in the cases where it's still usable, it has become seriously nonoptimal. (I don't know any other sites besides yours that are domain-absolutist rerouters, so even good addresses will pass through several domained sites before being delivered). > My sendmail.cf is perfectly happy to leave RFC822-compliant headers > alone. > However, if I receive mail which shows OWHN!user@F.Q.D.N and I am > about to route it out of here as UUCP mail, that syntax cannot be > assured of working, because "dumb" UUCP sites cannot be counted on to > obey RFC822's requirement of @-over-! precedence. So I rewrite > "OWHN!user@F.Q.D.N" as "F.Q.D.N!OWHN!user" in the From: line... Well, you've contradicted yourself since you've just changed an RFC822-compliant header into a noncompliant one. And really, this rewriting does no good, and real harm. Dumb UUCP sites don't reply to the From: address, they reply to the From_ address (which you've set up exactly right). [I say this after a quick look at the original SysV.2 mailer. Does anyone know any dumb mailers that use From:?] I don't see why you're trying to protect the dumb sites from seeing owhn!user@f.q.d.n when you're now giving them an address beginning with a domain, which they can't handle anyway. > If everybody left the > From: line alone, it would be set to whatever the first broken mailer > set it to, which is frequently incorrect right from the outset. And if everyone screws with it, it will eventually get broken even if it was correct from the outset. I don't see anything wrong with changing addresses that are already broken (like your user@owhn example), but I hate seeing people rewrite perfectly good ones. > Incoming Address Departing via Rewrite > -------- ------- --------- --- ------- > owhn!user local or UUCP don't touch it Interesting. You don't even change it to osu-cis!owhn!user? > owhn!user@f.q.d.n local or SMTP don't touch it > UUCP "From:" -- f.q.d.n!owhn!user In some ways this is the worst of several worlds. Dumb UUCP sites (even if they do use From:) can't use it because it begins with something that isn't a neighboring UUCP site. And smart sites, seeing that it isn't RFC822, will try to "fix" it. --- Tom Fitzgerald Wang Labs fitz@wang.com 1-508-967-5278 Lowell MA, USA ...!uunet!wang!fitz