Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!necntc!ima!minya!jc
From: jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Rerouting of explicit paths
Message-ID: <475@minya.UUCP>
Date: 8 Mar 88 00:58:24 GMT
References: <327@vsi1.UUCP>
Organization: home
Lines: 26
Summary: How to make sendmail do this?

> (FLAME ON!)
> As far as rerouting mail sent through your site goes, this should be considered
> to be a no-no subject to immediate de-netting!  A user several hops away has
> no way to know that you are going to screw up his path.  

I've agreed with this publicly on numerous occasions, and now find myself in
a position of wishing to do it right, and not quite knowing how.  The problem
is the notorious sendmail, which is running on various machines over which I
have Postmaster power (if I choose to accept the assignment, knowing full well
that the whole thing is likely to self-destruct in my hands in 3 minutes :-).

So the puzzle I have for all you mail wizards out there:  Is there a simple
(well, I know nothing about sendmail is simple, but I can dream, can't I?),
straighforward recipe for taking an existing sendmail.cf and modifying it
so that it takes bang paths literally?

The problem gets somewhat more complicated by the fact that several of the
machines have more than one kind of email link, so the hostname before the
bang should be looked up in any of several files (or dbm databases) to find
out which mailer is best to use.  I have a vague, semi-mystical idea of how
this is done, and I can make it work more than half the time (which seems
good enough for most Postmasters, but I'm a weird, picky sort).  Any good
ideas?

-- 
John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)