Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!karl_kleinpaste From: karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: is uunet breaking your headers? Message-ID: Date: 1 Jun 90 15:22:40 GMT References: Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 51 fitz@wang.com writes: Well, I get sh*tloads of failure cases here. What I meant by a "failure case" was "a case where the transform _in_and_of_itself_ doesn't work." It _does_ work: I _can_ exchange back and forth between the two forms without error. And given that the transform is !-path-centric, and that the most common intelligent UUCP router is smail 2.5, and that smail 2.5 knows how to deal with proper.domain.name!anything, then it can be considered to work in general. Well, you've contradicted yourself since you've just changed an RFC822-compliant header into a noncompliant one. No. By the time I'm routing out via UUCP, RFC822 no longer applies. I've argued this more times than I can count, in such areas as my choice to be a Domain Absolutist Rabid Rerouter. I've transformed the header into something that a(n assumed) dumb[*] UUCP neighbor can cope with, but in a form that is readily transformable back into an RFC header if the receiving site wants it that way. From what my UUCP neighbors tell me, they do, and they know how. > 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? No. That would be redundant. This _is_ osu-cis. > 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. Truly dumb sites will use the From_ address, which has "osu-cis!" prepended. Smart sites (even only to the level of intelligence of smail 2.5, and certainly with sendmail) can deal with the From: adequately. It works. I constitute my own existence proof of that fact. My main mail-routing host here shoveled 12Gbytes of mail in the month of May. I haven't heard even one complaint about routing errors or abuse. --karl [*] "Dumb UUCP site" == /bin/{r,}mail and /usr/bin/uux only. Anything beyond that (e.g., smail) constitutes a smart site.