Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hpfcdc!hpfclp!diamant
From: diamant@hpfclp.SDE.HP.COM (John Diamant)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: UCB Mail tries to be too smart
Message-ID: <1410010@hpfclp.SDE.HP.COM>
Date: 20 Feb 89 01:17:39 GMT
References: <885@ur-cc.UUCP>
Organization: HP SESD, Fort Collins, CO
Lines: 41

> 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
[...]
> 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.

Sorry to disagree with you, but you are the one violating the mail standards.
You've taken an RFC-822 compliant mail address and broken it.  The user agent
has the right to expect a RFC compliant address in the headers.  What it does
with a non-compliant one is undefined, of course.  You can argue back and forth
as to what it should do in this corner case, but the primary error is in
having your sendmail.cf break the RFC-822 address.

While you could probably argue that RFC-822 is only required between hosts
(as defined in the scope section of RFC-822), if you expect to work with
mailers designed to operate on RFC-822 headers (MH, UCB Mail, etc), you can't
just randomly diverge from 822 format and expect them to comply.  The standard
doesn't require internal formats to match RFC-822, but expect to require
mailers specifically designed for the alternate format if you chose to
diverge.

If you are trying to do what I suspect you are (avoid unnecessary local
delivery between equivalent hosts), you should have your configuration
recognize that all hosts in a particular set are equivalent and may be
delivered locally (and you could even substitute the name of the mail hub for
the local node if you wanted).


John Diamant
Software Engineering Systems Division
Hewlett-Packard Co.		ARPA Internet: diamant@hpfclp.sde.hp.com
Fort Collins, CO		UUCP:  {hplabs,hpfcla}!hpfclp!diamant