Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!linus!necntc!dandelion!ulowell!page From: page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: rewriting From: lines Summary: sometimes ya gotta do it Message-ID: <8446@swan.ulowell.edu> Date: 5 Aug 88 16:29:26 GMT References: <676@bacchus.DEC.COM> <881@vsi1.UUCP> <3674@palo-alto.DEC.COM> Reply-To: page@swan.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) Organization: University of Lowell, Computer Science Dept. Lines: 39 vixie@palo-alto.DEC.COM (Paul Vixie) wrote: >Sun thinks it owns the world. > From: vixie!paul@Sun.COM Many Internet mailers do this when going from bangland to the Internet. ULowell does it, and I know Harvard and MIT do it too. Rude is a relative term. You say munging From: lines is rude. I say sending Internet sites From: lines like vixie!paul is rude. The problem is that when people use a machine as a gateway to get from UUCP-land to the Internet, Internet-only hosts don't know (or care) what From: vixie!paul means, since they don't have anyone named vixie!paul on their local machine. Rewriting it to From: vixie!paul@swan.ulowell.edu will allow Internet systems to reply, as long as my mailer can handle the address. It should, since I'm the one constructing it. If Sun doesn't correctly deal with the From: lines it generates, Sun is being rude to UUCP land. If they pass along bangland addresses to the Internet, they're propagating your rudeness to the Internet. If UUCP hosts would generate non-bang From: lines, or Internet hosts understood bang paths, this would not be necessary. Having said that, rewriting from uucp-to-uucp is rude, and it's difficult to say if rewriting user@host.uucp from uucp to the internet is rude or not. They are not easy choices. One can run by strict rules, or bend the rules so more things work. But I agree that rerouting, under any circumstances, is rude. ..Bob -- Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept. page@swan.ulowell.edu ulowell!page "What a wonder is USENET; such wholesale production of conjecture from such a trifling investment in fact." -- Carl S. Gutekunst