Xref: utzoo comp.mail.sendmail:551 comp.mail.misc:1644 comp.bugs.4bsd:1215 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cornell!rochester!uhura.cc.rochester.edu!msir From: msir@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Mark Sirota) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.mail.misc,comp.bugs.4bsd Subject: Re: UCB Mail tries to be too smart Message-ID: <918@ur-cc.UUCP> Date: 21 Feb 89 19:34:24 GMT References: <885@ur-cc.UUCP> <888@ur-cc.UUCP> Reply-To: msir@cc.rochester.edu (Mark Sirota) Followup-To: comp.mail.sendmail Organization: Univ. of Rochester, Computing Center Lines: 67 In article <885@ur-cc.UUCP> I write: > I just found a misfeature with UCB Mail. If remote mail comes in (i.e. > mail from a remote site, with a From: line of the form > remote-user@remote-host > and your sendmail.cf strips the hostname off of local addresses, so that > the To: reads just > local-user > instead of > local-user@local-host > and the local user does a replyall in UCB Mail, then the resulting To: > line will be > local-user@remote-host remote-user@remote-host > > I find this unacceptable. It would seem that UCB mail is trying to be > intelligent; that is, it's assuming that remote-host may have been dumb > and not fully qualified it's addresses, so it tries to recreate it for you. > > Well, I don't want it to do that. I deliberately strip the local machine > name off of all addresses before local delivery, so the headers will never > contain the local host name. Well, I've gotten quite a large number of responses to this. Unfortunately, there seems to be no consensus. About half the people agree with me that UCB Mail is brain-damaged, and the other half think I'm brain-damaged for stripping local hostnames in the first place. Given that, I'm willing to give up the campaign to change UCB Mail (although I still think it's brain-damaged). Only one person was able to give me a persuasive reason not to strip local hostnames (hope you don't mind, Craig): In message "Craig F. Everhart" writes: | What you're doing seems reasonable at first, but there are oddball cases | that I wonder if you're handling correctly. I can think of re-sending and | forwarding (packaging onemessage inside the body of another) as example | user actions that often aren't handled in a correct manner when local host | names are stripped (or abbreviated),and I imagine that there are others. | Just to be clear, the problems I cite occur when a piece of mail is sent | locally, then that received piece of mail is re-sent or forwarded | elsewhere; the addresses in the headers aren't usually updated correctly. | What happens when some external recipient of such mail tries to use the | addresses in the headers of that mail? So, my inclination is to put the local hostname on *all* local addresses, even those that are completely local. For instance, if I mail joeuser on my-machine, the From: header will be "From: msir@my-machine", and the To: header will be "To: joeuser@my-machine". | These complications, and others I'm sure, are why RFC822 says that | exchanged mail needs to have fully-qualified host names. While I imagine | that you could fix up all these and other problems, most Internet sites | use RFC822 as their internal mail representation also, so that the act of | mail crossing between inside and outside isn't as complicated as relaying | mail between dissimilar maildomains. I ask the net: Is this true? Do "most Internet sites use RFC822 as their *internal* mail representation also"? Thanks for any and all opinions. Mark -- Mark Sirota - University of Rochester, Rochester, NY Internet: msir@cc.rochester.edu Bitnet: msir_ss@uordbv.bitnet UUCP: ...!rochester!ur-cc!msir