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Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!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: <1990Oct22.011036.3679@cs.utk.edu>
Date: 22 Oct 90 01:10:36 GMT
References: <329@puma.ge.com> <1990Oct18.220124.7784@cs.utk.edu> <1990Oct21.103233.7518@idt.unit.no>
Sender: news@cs.utk.edu (USENET News System)
Reply-To: moore@betelgeuse.cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore)
Organization: CS Dept -- University of TN, Knoxville
Lines: 36

In article <1990Oct21.103233.7518@idt.unit.no> he@spurv.runit.sintef.no (Havard Eidnes) writes:
>In article <1990Oct18.220124.7784@cs.utk.edu> moore@cs.utk.edu (Keith Moore) writes:
>>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.
>
>This can be circumvented by having the mail11 receiver (mail11d) call
>sendmail with a special configuration file only designed to rewrite DECnet
>addresses, and then passing the mail onwards to the real sendmail. (No, I
>didn't think of this myself...)
>
>- Havard

Actually, I've tried this to a limited extent.  I gave up because
sendmail has too much code that assumes RFC822-style addresses
(despite the need to do some of the parsing in the config file).
For instance, for our local configuration, I wanted to translate
inbound mail-11 From: lines of the form NODE::BITNET%"USER@XYZZY"
into USER@XYZZY.BITNET, but there was no way to get sendmail to
"break open" the quoted string without modifying C code.

This technique does work pretty well for, say, handling inbound UUCP mail,
where you want to interpret envelope addresses of the form a!b!c@d to mean 
"send to b!c@d via a", rather than "send to a!b!c via d", as when the message
arrives via SMTP/TCP.  The drawback is that it's bad enough to have to
maintain a single sendmail.cf file, much less one for each mail channel.

Keith Moore
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.''