Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.ai.toronto.edu!lamy
From: lamy@ai.utoronto.ca (Jean-Francois Lamy)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: rewriting FROM: lines
Message-ID: <89Jun8.105359edt.11740@neat.ai.toronto.edu>
Date: 8 Jun 89 14:51:55 GMT
References: <31051@sri-unix.SRI.COM> <160@zebra.UUCP> <24763@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <996@twwells.uucp> <174@icdi10.UUCP>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Lines: 33

>As far as twwells.uucp is concerned:  if you'll check up above, I haven't
>yet figured out where rn is getting ay of Pnews that hasn't yet been taught
>that we are ncoast.org.  News is a b*tch.

The problem is that news has only the crudest notion of what a return address
ought to be.  Fix your inews, and modify the rn templates so they don't
include the sender information.  At least then you know then where to fix
things (namely inews).

What I did here was to fix our mailer so "mail comp.mail.uucp" would work
properly (usenet is now just another transport mechanism like smtp, uucp,
x.400, bsmtp, with the weird feature that it broadcasts messages).  That way,
the mailer gets to sanitize the From: lines, does it in full knowledge of what
the mail address ought to be, and gets it right.  In fact, many mailers do
some fancy footwork like generating John.Doe@site.do.main and you really don't
want to have to put back those smarts in the article posting machinery.

To put an end to mail return address concerns I put in a fake inews (used by
Pnews) that takes the message and mails it to the appropriate newsgroups.
That way the mailer deals with the mail-related part (generating the mail
return address) and the news mechanism deals with propagating the crud.
Since that fake inews is only used by individals the extra overhead of
going through the mailer is negligible.

I'm not going to mention that you need a proper mailer to get this to work,
because the one we run is in alpha testing.  The usenet transport agent is
sendmail-compatible, but don't ask me about getting sendmail to understand
comp.mail.uucp as an address that reuires routing to usenet, I'm not the one
to know. I am going to mention that running C news makes this easier, since
it's finally coming out for real...

Jean-Francois Lamy               lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy
AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4