Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!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: <1990Dec19.193718.20572@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 19 Dec 90 19:37:18 GMT
References: <1990Dec13.131236.25304@mp.cs.niu.edu> <276D0D6A.6581@tct.uucp> <1990Dec18.152151.29598@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Lines: 31

In article <1990Dec18.152151.29598@mp.cs.niu.edu> rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

>If, on the other hand, you address your message to 'root@earth.uucp'
>and it reaches my site, it won't finish up at the geology department at
>all - it will go the the 'earth.uucp' on the maps.

As it should.  However, if that header line exists in a message that you
pass over the internet, the information that you used to determine
where it should be delivered will no longer exist.  (At least if
you re-write the site.uucp portion into something else).

> If I see mail with a header address 'user@host.valid.domain', and I am
>forwarding it to a host which does not understand RFC822 addresses, I WILL
>rewrite that as 'host.valid.domain!user'.  The fact that uucpnode may not
>be the final destination is AN IMPORTANT PART of the reason.  For 'uucpnode'
>is very likely to blindly stick 'uucpnode!' in front of the address.  This
>totally massacres the RFC822 format address, but does no serious harm to the
>form changed into bang notation.

By itself, I see no problem with this.  Handling domain!user and user@domain
as fully equivalent makes perfect sense.  However, the sites that prepend
their own name may not be doing so blindly.  They may in fact only
do it when a "!" already exists in the header line.  This is the case
with smail 3 at least, but somewhere I recall seeing it mentioned that
the reason was basically that most sendmail cf's handled it that way.
Then the next site may not add their uucpname, and the recipient
is left with an unqualified non-nieghbor site as the first hop in a path.
Perhaps this isn't the case with your neighbors.
 
Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us