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From: Malcolm.Harper@prg.oxford.ac.uk
Newsgroups: mail.uk-sendmail-workers,comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Mangled header problem with sendmail.5.61.IDA
Message-ID: <9104241220.AA01017@gruffle.comlab.prg.ox.ac.uk>
Date: 24 Apr 91 12:20:13 GMT
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Organization: Glasgow University Computing Science Dept.
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We're running 5.61++ IDA sendmail ($Header: READ_ME_UK,v 1.5 89/08/18 12:30:15)
and have encountered a problem with header rewriting, especially of "From:"
and "Reply-To:" lines.

There seems to be no problem with lines of the form
        From: Malcolm.Harper@uk.ac.oxford.prg (Malcolm Harper (Postmaster))
but lines of the form
        From: Malcolm.Harper@uk.ac.oxford.prg (Malcolm Harper \(Postmaster\))
get mangled into
        From: Malcolm.Harper@prg(.oxford.ac.uk (Malcolm Harper \(Postmaster\))
and then fail with "Unbalanced '('".

As far as I can tell, our system does not add the "\" characters before the
inner brackets, but we are receiving frequent "From:" lines of this form from
various mailing lists (such as cellular-automata, help-gnu-emacs, infovax and 
xpert).

The addresses are sometimes mangled into
        From: user@machine(:university:edu (Forename Surname \(comment\))
but that may be through subsequent mangling by the (UK-2.1 configured)
sendmail rewrite rules.

Has anyone else seen this problem?

-- Malcolm Harper