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Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!cbatt!ihnp4!alberta!ncc!lyndon
From: lyndon@ncc.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers
Subject: Re: My gawd...
Message-ID: <1342@ncc.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 26-Feb-87 22:22:00 EST
Article-I.D.: ncc.1342
Posted: Thu Feb 26 22:22:00 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 2-Mar-87 06:44:30 EST
References: <1061@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu> <394@stracs.cs.strath.ac.uk>
Organization: Nexus Computing Corp.,  Edmonton, AB
Lines: 62

In article <394@stracs.cs.strath.ac.uk>, jim@cs.strath.ac.uk (Jim Reid) writes:
> In article <1061@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu> page@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) writes:
> >I've been thinking that there should be some organization that made sure
> >sites had decent mailers - so many people violate the most fundamental
> >parts of the major RFC's, for various reasons.  Some sites, like
> >seismo, rutgers and csnet-relay do it because the admins there say
> >"if we were 100% compliant, many sites could not respond, since THEY
> >are not RFC compliant."  I say screw the sites that can't comply;
> >this is the fastest way to get them to shape up.
> 
> Oh, that it were true! What proportion of sites on USENET are stuck with
> V7-style mailers that can only cope with UUCP bang-style addresses? They
> won't comply with RFC822 and I doubt if many of them could become RFC822
> compliant even if they wanted to. [Anybody fancy putting sendmail or MMDF
> up on a XENIX box with a 20 Mbyte disk? :-)] 

I can see the immediate comeback:

	"Why not install [smail, uumail, gnumail, ...]?"

In most cases this is a very nice solution to the problem (we
have run smail for close to a year now).

Unfortunately, Bobs answer is not universally possible (in addition
to being in bad taste...), and this problem will grow larger over
the next few years. Why? Well, it seems that AT&T (in their infinite
wizdumb) has decided to unbundle UNIX. As a result, many customers
will not have the "Programmers Toolkit" (or whatever it is they call
cc these days) and will therefore be unable to compile a mailer that
complies with RFC822. Screw them? Sorry, someone has beaten you to it.

The fact that large numbers of sites are breaking the rules is largely
due to a poor decision made by the sendmail implementors, who I doubt
had any idea of what would happen to UUCP routing "down the road".
I had hoped (well, just a *little*) that 4.3 sendmail would acknowledge
the existance of domain addresses in the From: header as the default
case, but I gather that this did not happen. Looking at the sendmail
documentation, code, and those awful .cf files, I don't wonder why
noone bothers to change things.

So what are we to do? I think the first step is to try to get as
many UUCP sites running a "standard" mailer package. (I hear screams
in the audience). "Never!" they say. Perhaps not, but look at the
near universal acceptance of the Bnews software. I'm not implying
that it would be easy, just that it wouldn't be *impossible*.
There are quite a number of independent pieces of software available
on the net that handle various aspects of the problem (i.e. routers:
smail, uumail  UA's: elm, others_I_can't_remember). With considerable
effort, we could probably amalgamate the best of these into a single
integrated source distribution. Perhaps the authors of some of these
packages would care to comment on this?

This still doesn't help the poor sucker who doesn't have a C compiler
though. I don't know if there really is a solution here, other than to
send the mailer source to all the systems vendors with an plea that they
include it as part of their port. Actually, maybe it should be included
as a *free* *bonus* add-on, lest AT&T sue the USENET community at large
for not complying with SVID... (no smiley as I'm not being funny here)

-- 
Lyndon Nerenberg - Nexus Computing Corp. - lyndon@ncc.UUCP
UUCP: {ihnp4,ubc-vision,vax135,watmath}!alberta!ncc!lyndon