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From: sshurr%wellesley.edu@RELAY.CS.NET
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: mail problem
Message-ID: <9894@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 21-Oct-87 21:41:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.9894
Posted: Wed Oct 21 21:41:51 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Oct-87 20:21:20 EDT
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 38

Greetings,
I'm seeking help with a problem with mail as follows:

Environment: microVAX II Ultrix 2.0

I type either of the following:
% mail 1stperson 2ndperson
% mail 1stperson,2ndperson

I type in the message and send it.

1stperson or 2ndperson, upon reading the message, sees:

To: 1stperson.2ndperson

When 1stperson or 2ndperson sends a reply to all the recipients of the
original message, he gets an error message from MAILER-DAEMON saying:
Couldn't find 1stperson.2ndperson

So the question is, how can I prevent sendmail from sticking that dot
in between the two addresses?  Our documentation of sendmail says under
RESTRICTIONS:
The sendmail command converts blanks in addresses to dots.  This is
incorrect according to the old ARPANET mail protocol RFC733 (NIC41952)
but is consistent with the new protocols (RFC822).

So if this is the case how is sendmail able to distinguish whether the
dot is the delimeter between two addresses or is part of a single address?
I don't see any way of changing the sendmail.cf file to do this, nor any
switches to mail to affect that behavior.
As an aside, if we use the mh comp command instead of mail to compose a
message, and address it to person1 person2, the mail is received with a
To: address of person1, person2 which appears to me to be a correct
syntax.  But most of our users still use mail so it would be nice to fix this.

Thanks for any assistance that can be offered.

--Scott Shurr: sshurr or postmaster @wellesley.edu