Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!oliveb!veritas!tron
From: tron@veritas.uucp (Ronald S. Karr)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Question on group names in headers
Message-ID: <1990Oct29.193755.6168@veritas.uucp>
Date: 29 Oct 90 19:37:55 GMT
References: <710@dptspd.sat.datapoint.com>
Organization: VERITAS Software
Lines: 31

In article <710@dptspd.sat.datapoint.com> lcz@dptspd.sat.datapoint.com (Lee Ziegenhals) writes:
>	To: some.thing.or.another.;@some.where
>
>I know very little about mail headers, so I would appreciate any comments
>on the subject.  Smail is not following the "be liberal in what you
>accept" policy here, but I would like to know if this form of addressing
>is valid or not before I go munging the code.

The form is not valid.  Also, smail is supposed to reject such mail
messages only if it is asked (using the -t option) to extract the
recipient messages from the mail header itself (though there appears
to be a bug here).  However, with the -t option, smail must reject
such a message, because the message is meaningless.

I believe the bug can be fixed by applying the following (unofficial)
patch:

Index: src/header.c
***************
*** 116,121 ****
--- 116,122 ----
  	/* got an error message while extracting recipients, done */
  	return error;
      }
+     error = NULL;
  
      /*
       * if no recipient fields given, create a To: field containing
-- 
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