Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!pmafire!uudell!milano!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!newstop!sun!amdcad!dgcad!gary From: gary@proa.sv.dg.com (Gary Bridgewater) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: internet/uucp mail Message-ID: <659186205.1594@proa.sv.dg.com> Date: 21 Nov 90 11:16:45 GMT References: <1990Nov15.205028.4567@beach.csulb.edu> <658804371.13790@proa.sv.dg.com> Organization: Data General SDD, Sunnyvale, CA Lines: 67 In article fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) writes: >gary@proa.sv.dg.com (this is me) writes: >> are abusing addresses like this. Their outgoing "From:" address rewriter >> should not be blindly appending their domain address - it should check to >> see if the current addresses is in "!" form and, if so, either 1) leave it >> alone, or 2) PRE-pend their UUCP address if they have one. > >If bigcorp was sending the message over a UUCP link, yes; but in this case >the message is going over SMTP to beach.csulb.edu and bigcorp.com has to >make it RFC822 compliant before sending it. The easiest way to do this is >by appending @bigcorp.com to it. But this generates an address that will give a naive UUCP site fits. >The only way bigcorp could avoid this is if the message arrived with >"From: dest.dom.ain!user", in which case bigcorp could rewrite it to >"From: user@dest.dom.ain" before passing it on. If there isn't already a >domain somewhere in the From: line, bigcorp has to append one. Actually, they could just leave it alone. But, RFC-976 says: Because of the confusion surrounding hybrid addresses, we recommend that all transport layer software avoid the use of hybrid addresses at all times. A pure bang syntax can be used to disambiguate, being written c.d!a!b in the first case above, and a!c.d!b in the second. We recommend that all implementations use this "bang domain" syntax unless they are sure of what is running on the next machine. In conformance with RFC-822 and the AT&T Message Transfer Architecture, we recommand that any host that accepts hybrid addresses apply the (a!b)@c.d interpretation. >> A UUCP onlu site, when presented with uucpdest!user@knownhost.com address, >> has to punt this to its smart upstream forwarder via >> smart!knownhost.com!uucpdest!user. > >Not if it has a set of maps, and the maps contain knownhost.com. In that >case it might find a better path to knownhost that doesn't go through >'smart'. Sure. I thought that went without saying since the original poster was asking how to deal with such addresses - by munging his .cf file. I keep hoping it will become that simple (I'm a simple minded guy) but sites come on line faster than the speed of knowledge and dealing with their mail is a recurring pain for sites that are gateways. But if, as you say, the answer is to use pathalias then I re-iterate that bighost should just leave "!" paths alone so as to not prejudice any pathalias reply. Or pre-pend its registered UUCP address including its domain and following "!" syntax. Appending an "@" address to a "!" path to somehow "satisfy" RFC-822 knowing full well that leaf sites will choke on it invokes the "Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" rule with a vengence. There are just too many of these binary-only, under-documented, just-plain-users sites to continue to hope that new sites will eventually get with it. This is not a knock on them, just a result of the explosive acceptance of unix and/or the usefulness of e-mail. So - to the original poster - get pathalias and build the maps. Get smail3 (or, possibly, deliver) and pass your mail off to one of them. They can be configured to deal with domainish addresses and to look up a path for them. It is probably best to leave your .cf file alone in this case since you would have to do ugly things that will, without doubt, trip up you or your successor in the future. This pushes the delivery problem off onto software designed to to delivery. -- Gary Bridgewater, Data General Corporation, Sunnyvale California gary@sv.dg.com or {amdahl,aeras,amdcad}!dgcad!gary C++ - it's the right thing to do.