Path: utzoo!attcan!telly!lethe!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!uunet!sco!curtisg
From: curtisg@sco.COM (Curtis Galloway)
Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew
Subject: AMS and MMDF
Message-ID: <9302@scolex.sco.COM>
Date: 19 Dec 90 19:21:06 GMT
Sender: news@sco.COM
Lines: 71



I'm having some trouble setting up the Andrew Message System to work
with our MMDF system, and I'm hoping someone can give me some helpful
hints.

I'm running the R4 Andrew distribution, patchlevel 7; here's the
relevant bits from my AndrewSetup file:

=====
ThisDomain: sco.COM
AMS_UseShortFileNames: yes
AMS_MailBoxPrefix: /usr/spool/mail
MessagesAutoBugAddress: "curtisg@sco.COM"
OldSendmailProgram:/usr/andrew/bin/oldsendmail
AMS_UseWP: no
AMS_ValidateDestHosts: no
AMS_UUCPSupported: yes
AMS_DeliveryViaHostTable: no
AMS_DeliveryViaGethostbyname: no
AMS_AliasesValidation: yes
AMS_PasswdValidation: 0
AMS_WPValidation: 0
#AMS_NoDomainPreferredOnLocalMail: yes
=====

I'm running into several problems, although I have been using Messages
to read and send mail successfully most of the time.

The first problem is that AMS doesn't seem to recognize external UUCP
addresses.  An address of the form "machine!user" gets turned into
"machine!user@sco.COM", which works but is pretty ugly.

The second problem comes in replying to mail from older mailers here.
Often, the address line is of the form:
"To: john peter carl"
When I reply to a message like this, I get:
"To: john.peter.carl@sco.COM"
I assume that AMS is trying to parse the address as if it were a
complete name, and then inserting its favorite space-replacement
character to turn it into a valid address.  I'd like to be able to
modify or turn off this behavior.

The next problem is with alias validation.  I patched the message
server code to read from the file /usr/lib/mail/aliases instead of
/usr/lib/aliases.  Unfortunately, this seems to have had no effect.
It will accept anything as a valid user name, whether or not it's in
the alias file.

Next, /usr/lib/sendmail doesn't quite work correctly on my system.  My
replacement "oldsendmail" converts the arguments from sendmail and
calls execmail, which does the same job.  However, execmail validates
the addresses itself and returns an error code if an address is
invalid.  I'd like to be able to use this information, but for now, I
just have to ignore it because AMS doesn't expect the dropoff program
to return any sort of advisory error messages.

Finally, has any work been done to make the mail file reading code
recognize more complex message separators?  Specifically, I'd like it
to understand that messages are delimited by a string of four ^A
characters at their beginning and end, rather than just separated by a
single character.

Thanks in advance for your comments.

--Curt

--
Curtis Galloway
The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
uunet!sco!curtisg -or- curtisg@sco.com