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From: jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk (John Forrest)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Sendmail 5.65+IDA and the UK
Message-ID: <1990Nov8.103002@ap.co.umist.ac.uk>
Date: 8 Nov 90 10:30:02 GMT
Sender: usenet@cns.umist.ac.uk (News System)
Reply-To: jf@ap.co.umist.ac.uk (John Forrest)
Organization: UMIST Computation, Manchester, UK.
Lines: 36

Here's another question concerning sendmail 5.65+IDA. [Thanks to all those people
who put me in thge picture regarding MB records}.

Has anyone in the UK started using this configuration yet? 

For those people who live outside (the UK that is), we have a special problem
when it comes to sendmail. Several years ago an august quasi-government body
called The Computer Board decided on a mailing/remove access scheme as defined in
a number of ``Coloured Books''. In the main this relates to how mail, file
transfer, and remote transfer takes place between UK universities etc. Sendmail
can (easily?) deal with this by using a special mailer. However, there is a
problem, and the problem is the address notation. In the ``grey book'' notation,
my mail address is defined as:

	jf@uk.ac.umist.co.ap

note the back-to-front nature. Now most, if not all, UK mailers will understand
the RFC format. On our node (we rely on a relay to access the outside world), we
deal almost exclusively with RFC format - we type RFC formats, and we transmit
with RFC formats, as in the rest of the world. The one sop to the UK tradition is
that if we receive mail in the previous format, we turn it round. This is encoded
by our mods to the Berkeley M4 files. At the moment, in traditional fashion, we
will reverse anything that looks like a UK format - for example, umist.co.ap is
converted to ap.co.umist, which we look up with BIND to get ap.co.umist.ac.uk. In
the future, we might just do this for fully expanded reversed names.

Anyway, back to the original question. Has anyone already altered the Sendmail
5.65+IDA setup so it will cope with reversed names? I know how to do it, but it
would save alot of hassle.

John Forrest,
Dept. of Computation,
UMIST.

PS. I know New Zealand people used the grey book as well, so they might have the
same problem?