Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!dptg!ulysses!andante!alice!ches
From: ches@alice.UUCP (Bill Cheswick)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Paths and Precedence (Re: Question about From: lines)
Summary: bangs aren't quite enough, but close
Message-ID: <11034@alice.UUCP>
Date: 8 Jul 90 12:39:33 GMT
References: <2833.2674c5b3@mccall.com> <14298@ucsd.Edu> <2836.26750678@mccall.com> <1990Jul8.034615.15497@sopwith>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ
Lines: 29


>Keep it simple, stupid.  Use bang paths.
>
>[1] _That_Hideous_Name_, Rob Pike and P.J. Weinberger

We try to, but there are a couple complications:

	1) Some of our users like to use the addresses they are given, often
	with the `@' sign.  The upas mail canonicalizes this to the all bang
	format.  We follow RFC 1123 in these cases.

	2) When our Internet gateway moves this mail to the internet, we have
	to come up with some RFC 822-compliant address.  Past translations
	have included RFC976 and `%' forms.  Both were rejected by various
	(different) mailers reflecting the political philosophies of their
	keepers.  For a while we defaulted to `%' form with a stop-list
	for those insisting on RFC976.  We finally picked the source domain
	routing form, which turns out to be accepted generally, if grudgingly.

The bottom line is that the mail gets through, which is our goal.

BTW, it is wonderful to give the users the following forms:
	bitnet!machine!user
	inet!machine!user
	csnet!machine!user
etc.  Much easier to teach, and the lay user can avoid the @/% jungle entirely.

Bill Cheswick
postmaster@research.att.com