Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!umich!sharkey!oxtrap!mudos!mju
From: mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc Unangst)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: References line (RFC1036)
Message-ID: <387.246BCD99@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us>
Date: 13 May 89 06:05:29 GMT
Organization: A neat desk is a sign of a crazy person.
Lines: 40

In article <1222@psuhcx.psu.edu>, wcf@psuhcx.psu.edu (Bill Fenner) writes:
 >That would take quite a lot of changing on most of USENET's part.  Maybe
 >a better thing would be to ask the UFGATE folks to allow misc. header lines
 >that are at the top of the article to pass through in the header.  How
 >do you tell a header line from something like
 >First: I don't ...
 >or whatever?  I don't know.  Maybe keep a list of all the ones allowed
 >by RFC1036, or something.

I also use the UFGATE-and-MSGED combination, and have run into this problem,
too.  I've been lobbying for the UFGATE folks to allow you to add whatever
headers you want at the beginning of your message, followed by a blank
line, and then the body of the article.  If you didn't want to add any
header material, you would just make the first line of your message
blank.  (If you use the method you suggested (keep a list of headers
allowed), you would run into the problem of people who want to use
things like X-Phone: and X-Fax:.)

Unfortunately, because I have not had much luck convincing them to change
another annoying aspect of UFGATE's behavior(*), I doubt that this
change will happen soon.

(*) - UFGATE has a nasty habit of following the RFC-976 standard too closely.
For example, because every componant in an address with either "%" or "@"
in it is assumed to be a domain-ized host name (except the first componant,
which is assumed to be the user name), it insists on adding a period to
the end of "host1" in the address "user%host1@host2.with.domain", turning
it into "user%host1.@host2.with.domain".  This confuses sendmail to
no end, who (after querying the nameservers for "host1."), dutifully
bounces the mail.  John Galvin, the author of mailout (the mail exporter),
maintains that it is simply trying to make "host1" into a fully-qualified
domain-ized name.  Because of this behavior, I frequently have to add
".UUCP" to the end of a hostname, to prevent mailout from mangling it.

--  
Marc Unangst
UUCP smart    : mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us
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Internet      : mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us