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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!princeton!allegra!ulysses!gamma!mb2c!edsdrd!edstb!msudoc!umich!cosivax!b-tech!zeeff
From: zeeff@b-tech.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,comp.sources.d
Subject: smail 2.3
Message-ID: <2073@b-tech.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 11-Apr-87 03:56:15 EST
Article-I.D.: b-tech.2073
Posted: Sat Apr 11 03:56:15 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 19-Apr-87 00:21:15 EST
Organization: Branch Technology, Ann Arbor, MI
Lines: 30
Xref: mnetor comp.mail.uucp:476 comp.sources.d:598

After working with smail 2.3 a few hours, I have a few initial thoughts.
It installs easily on a Sys V.2 system w/o sendmail and generally
works well.  My thanks to the authors.

One thing I don't like is the aliasing - as stated in the docs, it 
doesn't handle mail to programs or files.  More importantly, it 
doesn't handle errors in delivering to aliases the way I think it 
should.  Take a situation where jim@xvax sends mail to foovax!group 
where group expands to a list of 10 people.  If one of the people in 
the group can't be reached, jim@xvax will receive an error message 
that he probably won't understand.  I claim that jim@xvax did nothing 
wrong - he correctly addressed his mail and it was successfully 
delivered to foovax!group.  The maintainer of the alias "group" should 
receive the error message.  I can see situations where jim@xvax might 
want to be notified, but in a mailing list situation, this behavior 
would not be well received.  I intend to have the local delivery agent 
handle aliases.  

Smail also doesn't seem to understand % in addresses (ie.  xxx%yyy@zzz 
gets sent to zzz!xxx%yyy.  Right or wrong, I do see % used.  

Please, nonflame comments/corrections only.


     

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Jon Zeeff           		Branch Technology, Ann Arbor, MI
seismo!umix!b-tech!zeeff  	zeeff%b-tech.uucp@umix.cc.umich.edu