Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!ncar!midway!gargoyle!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Which headers may Sendmail re-write?
Message-ID: <1990Dec16.203543.22769@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 16 Dec 90 20:35:43 GMT
References: <1990Dec11.130432.27684@mp.cs.niu.edu> <2766B2E7.276@tct.uucp> <1990Dec13.131236.25304@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Lines: 46

In article <1990Dec13.131236.25304@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

> Sure.  And when I relay Internet mail to 'uucpnode', and a user on
>'uucpnode' does a R(eply), my machine gets to relay a lot of the
>uucpnode's local mail back to it, since that node doesn't understand
>the form of address on the header so sends it to its forwarding relay
>for interpretation.

I don't think I follow this.  Can you give a real example?  Do you
mean a case where a message from the internet side includes CC: 's
to others on the same uucp machine but with the internet addressing
form so that mailx's <R> generates a name for the local machine that
the MTA doesn't know about?

> If I am going to follow this procedure I had better start charging real
>money for relay services.  I will probably pick up quite a bit of cash
>just from this stupid 'local relaying'. 

There's nothing wrong with charging for services, but I can't imagine that
the group reply problem would happen often enough to worry about.  Certainly
not often enough to do something that will break other software. For
example if you change "user@domain" to site!usr and pass it on to a path
where some of the hosts prepend their own uucp names to the line.  In that
case, the original would be usable but what they will receive may not be.
(For direct neighbors this shouldn't make much difference).

>  Some day the
>uucpsite admin is going to complain that with this improved service
>(of not munging headers) that I am charging him for, something funny is
>happening - he is not getting many replies to mail.  Probably because
>all of those Internet sites having difficulty replying to 'uucpsite!user'.

If headers aren't munged, you will never see a From: uucpsite!user.  The
sending site would just use a local form (if any).  As long as you
can resolve the replies coming back through you, I see no problem with
munging to user%site@your.domain but it would be a lot nicer if someone
had thought about inverting the mappings before the standards were written.
At least it's better than path!user@your.domain which is almost certain
to be munged and/or interpreted incorrectly if it is forwarded off the
internet (incorrectly isn't quite the right word since that type of address
doesn't have a defined meaning outside of SMTP, but if I hand it to a program
named "rmail" on a uucp machne, I wouldn't expect it to look past the first
"!".)

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us