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From: diamant@hpfclp.HP.COM (John Diamant)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Re: Bracketing in mail addresses - NO NO NO NO NO
Message-ID: <8120004@hpfclp.HP.COM>
Date: Sun, 21-Jun-87 18:43:30 EDT
Article-I.D.: hpfclp.8120004
Posted: Sun Jun 21 18:43:30 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 27-Jun-87 10:57:55 EDT
References: <654@vixie.UUCP>
Organization: HP, Fort Collins, CO
Lines: 56

> >>As far as I can tell from the documentation, smail gives precedence to the !
> >>over the @ when it sees both in the address field of an incoming message.
> >
> >Since SMAIL is advertised as a RFC-compliant mailer, this can't be right.
> 
> Well, the documentation to smail 2.3 says so. "To preserve compatibility with
> rmail".  But please enlighten me: why should there ever be a mixed address
> in UUCP land?

Please find this quote (with context).  I have taken a quick look through the
smail documentation and don't find anything of the sort.  I do find plenty
of references claiming RFC-822, 920 and 976 compatibility (in fact, it is
an implementation of RFC-976, so it better be compatible with it).  All these
standards explicitly require "@" precedence, and indeed, the whole point of
smail was to make the UUCP world RFC compliant.
> 
> There is also no need rewrite the envelope unless the destination CANNOT deal
> with it, so only gateways should have to do it, right?  And a UUCP to RFC822
> gateway can always produce a <> route, and a RFC822 to UUCP gateway can always
> produce a ! route, right?

I wish it were that simple.  Obviously, this is what you would have in an
ideal world (only gateways worry about address translation), but it isn't
that simple, unfortunately.  First of all, RFC-822 source routes can only be
used if each element is a registered domain (there are subtle points in the
wording of RFC-822 which mandate this).  This means, unregistered UUCP hosts
cannot be put in source routes.  One more problem is how to handle "%." Since
it isn't specified by any standard, it must remain untouched, which might work
O.K.  if the precedence everywhere were always "@", "!", any other characters
(including "%"), but some sites don't know anything about "!" and so interpret
"%" as higher precedence than "!."  When you translate from "!" addresses to
RFC style addresses, how do know whether to use a source route or a "%?"  I
think translating to "!" from "@" style doesn't present any problem except that
you can't reverse it because of the ambiguity.  If you could guarantee that
"!" always has higher precedece than any other character but "@," then you
could just leave "%" alone (which smail does) and translate source routes
into "!" routes.

> 
> It is much more likely that we can get fixed gateways than asking all sites in
> the universe to perpetuate the confusion between a route and an address.  What
> Rahul is asking is a new way to write routes, and we already have perfectly
> unambiguous ways to do that.

It certainly would be easier if all we needed is to get only gateways fixed,
but I don't know how to hide all this from the non-gateway machines.
> 
> Jean-Francois Lamy                        lamy@ai.toronto.edu
> AI Group, Dept Computer Science           {seismo,watmath}!ai.toronto.edu!lamy
> University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4                          


John Diamant
TSBU				UUCP:  {hplabs,hpfcla}!hpfclp!diamant
Hewlett Packard Co.		ARPA Internet: diamant%hpfclp@hplabs.HP.COM
Fort Collins, CO