Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!olivea!orc!inews!iwarp.intel.com!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: <1991Jan02.204945.2346@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 2 Jan 91 20:49:45 GMT
References: <27763742.4907@tct.uucp> <1990Dec26.170227.20484@chinet.chi.il.us> <277FE143.513F@tct.uucp>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Lines: 25

In article <277FE143.513F@tct.uucp> chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes:

>>I said uucp addresses are relative.  The distinction between @ and !
>>notation is purely syntactic and a sensible MTA will be able to convert
>>user@domain/domain!user (or a!b!c!d to @a,@b:d@c) transparently.

>Well, of course translation is possible.  That doesn't mean, however,
>that such a translation has no semantic meaning.

If there were any semantic meaning IMHO it should be that in addresses
containing a "!", everything to the right of the leftmost "!" should
be implicitly quoted (as per the original rmail which just didn't look
any farther).   Unfortunately, it doesn't necessarily work that way anymore.
 
>But on the way out from the Internet onto UUCP, I see no excuse for
>scrambling the syntax of header addresses into "dom.ain!user" on the
>assumption that the reworked syntax will be "treated the same."  It
>ain't necessarily so.

The odds are pretty good that the headers were already scrambled as
the message went into the SMTP transport if it didn't originate at
a site with a FQDN. 

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us