Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!bellcore!texbell!killer!ames!pasteur!agate!ucbvax!ENCORE.COM!bzs
From: bzs@ENCORE.COM (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Food for thought...
Message-ID: <8811090326.AA26953@multimax.encore.com>
Date: 9 Nov 88 03:26:34 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 30


Is it just possible that we have tolerated a mail system which has
grown so complicated that a program like sendmail with its generalized
regular expressions pattern matchers and massively complicated rules
(and several other complex "support" programs to figure out paths,
like pathalias) is about the simplest program which can do an adequate
job acting as a gateway?

Maybe it's time to start asserting some authority and saying that by
DD/MM/YY only host@legal.domain.name will be accepted and to hell with
all this punctuative creativity. Let creative people find ways to
conform to a standard.

I'll let sendmail speak for itself...(there are over 300 such lines
in a typical config file):

# more miscellaneous cleanup
R$+			$:$>8$1				host dependent cleanup
R$+:$*;@$+		$@$1:$2;@$3			list syntax
R$+@$+			$:$1<@$2>			focus on domain
R$+<$+@$+>		$1$2<@$3>			move gaze right
R$+<@$+>		$@$>6$1<@$2>			already canonical

Complexity breeds error.

(note: This is *not* a bash at sendmail, I honestly have never been
able to think of a much different way to effectively handle the
current miasma of addressing schemes.)

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||