Xref: utzoo comp.mail.mh:1165 comp.mail.sendmail:2282
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!emory!utkcs2!betelgeuse!moore
From: moore@betelgeuse.cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mh,comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: decnet mail addressing and MH
Keywords: decnet addresses MH
Message-ID: <1990Oct18.220124.7784@cs.utk.edu>
Date: 18 Oct 90 22:01:24 GMT
References: <329@puma.ge.com>
Sender: news@cs.utk.edu (USENET News System)
Reply-To: moore@cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore)
Organization: CS Dept -- University of TN, Knoxville
Lines: 96

In article <329@puma.ge.com> jjones@andrew.ATL.GE.COM.UUCP (Jeffrey Scott Jones) writes:
>We have a mixed environment of Ultrix and VAX/VMS systems here, and 
>we exchange a lot of mail between these systems.  I have configured our
>installation of MH to use sendmail (no SMTP).
>
>The problem that I am having is when my friends in VMS land send a mail
>message to me on Ultrix, the message format is in DECNet format.  The
>mail header is not received by MH from sendmail in a normal header
>format (it is in DECNet format).  So, when I attempt to reply to the
>message, MH fails to assemble the return address.
>
>I sent a message to myself with the To: line saying: To: jjones@atl.dnet
>here is what I got back:
>
>	Return-Path: atl::FOOBAR::jjones
>	Date: Tue, 16 Oct 90 08:12:30 EDT
>	From: atl::FOOBAR::jjones (Jeffrey Scott Jones)
>	To: atl::jjones
>	Subject: test from Mail
>
>
>	body of message
>
>FOOBAR is the name of the machine that I'm recieving mail on.
>
>I believe that the solution to this problem is to add a rule to
>sendmail.cf to rewrite the address on receipt from a DECNet connection,
>but I don't have the slightest idea of how to do this.

You have the right idea in that the headers of the message should be
rewritten before your mail user agent (in this case MH) sees it. 
Unfortunately, this is difficult to do well with sendmail rewrite rules, 
because:

a) The rule should only apply to messages that come from your DECnet
   gateway, not to messages that come from other sources.  Sendmail
   does not give you a good way to do selective rewriting based on
   where a message *comes from* (as opposed to mailer-specific rewrite
   rules for outgoing mail).  IDA sendmail does a better job.

b) It is difficult to translate multiple-hop DECnet addresses in a way
   that results in a "correct" translation that will not be munged by
   other sites running sendmails whose configurations violate rule (a).

c) The addresses in VMS MAIL To: and CC: lines are frequently illegal
   in the RFC822 world.  VMS MAIL accepts recipients of the form
   @filename and leaves them, uninterpreted, in the message header.
   VMS MAIL also accepts other kinds of DECnet addresses that don't
   even resemble the user@domain format common in the RFC822 world,
   but are confusing to RFC822 mail handling programs.  Most sendmail
   config's cannot make any sense of an address like NODE::PSI%digit-string,
   and sendmail cannot deal with quoted strings at all.

>An interesting note: I tried this exact experiment with Mail(1), and
>Mail has no problem dealing with the DECNet format addresses.  DEC must
>have munged Mail(1).  I don't think that was the correct choice.

It's possible that DEC munged Mail a bit.  Also, some user agents are
"smarter" than others about header addresses.  The stupid ones don't
complain no matter what you throw at them -- they just pass it to
sendmail or whatever and let it deal with them.  The smarter ones justly
complain about syntactically incorrect addresses.  Others are in-between --
they just core-dump when you give them something besides user@domain.

>How have you dealt with this?

Well, I wrote my own mail11 gateways.  My in-house versions of these gateways
have regular-expression -based rewrite rules to deal with several kinds
of addresses and intelligently coerce them into a reasonable RFC822 address.
It also queries the domain name server to translate DECnet node names
into Internet domain names, if such a name exists.

That version isn't ready for release yet, but you can get an older version
of the gateway via anonymous ftp to cs.utk.edu, directory readonly/mail11,
files mail11[d].{tar,shar}.

A modified version of the same gateway is available from anon ftp to 
gatekeeper.dec.com. (I don't remember which directory.)    This version
has different address translation mechanisms than my last released
version.  

If you are not in a position to change the gateway, you might want to
try compiling MH with either the DUMB or BERK options, which will make
it less picky about addresses.  Your mileage may vary -- MH has so many
options that affect its operation in subtle ways that once upon a time,
I grep-ed the entire MH source for #if, figured out exactly which set of
options to use, and made that set a local standard once and for all.  I
don't ever want to deal with it again.  (It's experiences like this that 
have encouraged me to work very hard on the next version of my mail-11 
gateways, in the hopes that the number of options can be minimized while 
still allowing the gateway to work well without modification for most 
sites.)

Keith Moore / U.Tenn CS Dept / 107 Ayres Hall / Knoxville TN  37996-1301
Internet: moore@cs.utk.edu      BITNET: moore@utkvx
``Paranoia is a drug which is more dangerous than any controlled substance.''