Newsgroups: can.uucp
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.ai.toronto.edu!rayan
From: rayan@ai.toronto.edu (Rayan Zachariassen)
Subject: Re: .ca domain weirdness with pathalias and smail
Message-ID: <88Dec17.114819est.38035@neat.ai.toronto.edu>
Summary: smail bug
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
References: <314@ontenv.UUCP>
Distribution: can
Date: Sat, 17 Dec 88 11:48:04 EST

Like Andrew points out, this is a problem with smail 2.x.  The semantics of
a pathalias output line like:

.foo.ca	bar!%s

is that "bar" knows how to get to the ".foo.ca" domain and its subdomains.
Therefore user@baz.foo.ca should turn into bar!baz.foo.ca!user, and user@foo.ca
should become bar!foo.ca!user.

Smail may be confusing the semantics in this case with that of

foo	bar!%s

which indeed indicates that bar and foo are the same machine.

I don't know what the fix for smail is.

3 or 4 different sites have asked me about this recently, thinking it was
a problem in the maps.

rayan