Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!deimos.cis.ksu.edu!mccall!tp From: tp@mccall.com Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Question about From: lines Message-ID: <2998.2688cec8@mccall.com> Date: 27 Jun 90 15:20:40 GMT References: <14278@ucsd.Edu> <1990Jun12.190023.24311@chinet.chi.il.us> <2844.2676131a@mccall.com> <1990Jun15.162029.27337@chinet.chi.il.us> Organization: The McCall Pattern Co., Manhattan, KS, USA Lines: 115 In article <1990Jun15.162029.27337@chinet.chi.il.us>, les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes: > Yes, I understand that RFC976 is intended only to specify uucp mapping > of RFC822 addresses. However the syntax is so much neater than % > or @routes, not to mention being straightforward to parse, that it > seems to me that it should be accepted everywhere. But it is non-standard. If it isn't in RFC822, it isn't going to be understood by EVERYBODY. There are already too many things that are only understood by some sites, not others. Just because it looks nice doesn't mean people will rush to change their software to handle it. Rather than invent another standard, we should try to make the current one (RFC822) work. That means getting sites not to mung compliant addresses, and getting everyone to get a compliant address (i.e. registered domain name). > In article <2844.2676131a@mccall.com> tp@mccall.com writes: >>The domain-bang-path notation was never intended to appear in RFC822 >>compliant headers (like From:), as this notation violates RFC822. > > But this wouldn't matter if (a) mailers understood do.main!user to > be equivalent to user@do.main and (b) didn't rewrite compliant > headers. But (a) they don't (not all of them), and (b) some of them do. How are you going to get them all to change? This will never happen unless RFC822 is updated and adopted by the group that controls internet standards (I know there is one, but I don't know who they are). The internet is too pervasive to buck. Most mail and news crosses it eventually. If your message doesn't follow internet standards, you are at the mercy of the postmaster of each machine, and how much he was inclined/able to deal with non-standard formats. >>Thus, no internet host SHOULD ever see a domain-bang-path address unless it >>put it there, with its domain name attached. > > Are you saying that internet hosts don't want to believe that there are > machines that they cannot access directly or that you prefer ambiguous > or arcane local-parts of addresses? Allowing an abitrary mix of > host and domain names parsed strictly left-to-right would make things > incredibly easy by comparison. The header lines should still not > be re-written unless done by a gateway that knows a different syntax > is needed to be understood by the destination, though. What I'm saying is that on the internet, the From: line MUST be RFC822 compliant. Internet hosts have a set of standards that they must follow to be compliant. The one that deals with mail is RFC822. They are under no obligation to support any extentions to this, and thus there will always be hosts that don't. In effect, the uucp world (specifically the UUCP Project, since nobody else stepped forward), decided to integrate into the internet as far as mail goes. This implies that uucp sites will get registered domain names and will follow the RFC822 standard for mail. As far as mail goes, the term `internet' really includes all uucp hosts that have registered domain names (which implies MX forwarders). An internet host can't tell the difference when sending the mail. Many actual internet hosts are only reachable via MX. The `uucp mail network' has no identity as a network in and of itself. It never has. As a result of the direction the UUCP Project has gone, it never will. As far as mail goes, you can either just be a uucp site, in which case things will never work well, or you can adopt RFC822 and get a registered domain name, in which case things will work fairly well. If we can get sites to stop rewriting valid RFC822 From: addresses, having a registered domain will work as well as being on the internet itself. If you want to use a different standard, it looks like you have 3 options: 1) Do what you want and hope it works, with no guarantees. That's what most unregistered uucp sites do now, by putting user@site.uucp or site!user or something else in the From: line, or not having a From: line and relying on the From_ line. 2) Get RFC822 modified and accepted as an internet standard. At some point, most all internet software would become compliant to the new standard. I bid you good luck. 3) Reject the concept of integrating into the internet address scheme. Form an alternate network of uucp sites, with gateways into whatever networks you want to talk with (e.g. the internet) that perform the gatewaying function the way you want. Then all legitimate gateways would have predicatable behavior, and you could develop a set of rules that would always work. Call your network something other than the `uucp mail network', though, and realize you would need gateways for it also, if you had any uucp links from your network to uucp sites that weren't in your network. Good luck getting this to work. On the other hand, you could consider Bitnet to be an example of this, and it seems to have worked at least as well as uucp (non-domain). My machine has a registered domain name, and as long as it is not munged, it doesn't matter that an internet site can't access me directly. I've been getting mail via this address since the day it was registered, 30 days before the maps were updated. If you have a non-RFC822 address, then you are stuck encoding it into the local-part, because you have NO OTHER OPTION. Once the mail crosses the internet it WILL be made RFC822 compliant. period. How the host that does this chooses to do it is up to the guy who wrote or configured the software. There isn't a standard to cover this. I think this is because no standard can fully handle it. You can make the choice rather than leaving it up to the gateway, by sending out something RFC822 compliant that you think will work, but because of munging, there is no guarantee that your From: line will survive. Domain-bang-path wouldn't solve the problem, even if it were allowed. If a bang path starts with an unqualified uucp host name, what does an internet site do with it? Remember that many sites won't update a bang-path on the From: line, so its contents are unreliable. Getting it into RFC822 would help, but non-internet sites would probably still mess it up. I really couldn't predict how big a problem that would be, or for how long. -- Terry Poot The McCall Pattern Company (uucp: ...!rutgers!ksuvax1!mccall!tp) 615 McCall Road (800)255-2762, in KS (913)776-4041 Manhattan, KS 66502, USA