Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!timbuk!cs.umn.edu!ub.d.umn.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!tuvie!iiasa!wnp
From: wnp@iiasa.AT (wolf paul)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: HELP ME OUT....
Message-ID: <921@iiasa.UUCP>
Date: 30 Oct 90 13:13:54 GMT
References: <1990Oct27.010347.13485@watcsc.waterloo.edu> <1990Oct28.210632.26119@engin.umich.edu>
Reply-To: wnp%iiasa@relay.eu.net (wolf paul)
Organization: IIASA, Laxenburg/Vienna, Austria, Europe
Lines: 38
Summary:

In article <1990Oct28.210632.26119@engin.umich.edu> stealth@caen.engin.umich.edu (Mike Pelletier) writes:
>
>	% - sort of a reverse bang, in a way...  The address in the
>	    previous example could be rewritten as
>	    "stealth%m-net%b-tech%caen%umich%mailrus@uunet.uu.net".
>	    When the message reaches uunet, the "@uunet.uu.net" would
>	    be removed and the @ sign would be moved to the leftmost
>	    % sign, the resulting address processed, and the message
>	    sent along.  The same thing would happen at each stage,
>	    until b-tech has a message to "stealth@m-net", which it
>	    could then deliver to M-net, and thus it would end up in
>	    my mailbox there.

What you describe is what I understand is supposed to happen. However
there are a bunch of sites out there where "%" gets translated into
actual "!", so that the above path becomes "stealth!m-net!b-tech..."
which is wrong.

The mailer at the Austrian backbone refuses to send mail to any
bang path where it cannot identify all sites specified in it, 
so I tried to send mail to an unmapped site as

  user%unmapped_site@their_mapped_feed.somename.com

which got translated to 

  user!unmapped_site@their_mapped_feed.somename.com

which the mailer at their_mapped_feed interpreted as

  user@their_mapped_feed.somename.com

and promptly rejected, since "user" did not have an account on their
system.
-- 
Wolf N. Paul, UNIX SysAdmin, IIASA, A - 2361 Laxenburg, Austria, Europe
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