Xref: utzoo comp.mail.sendmail:1255 comp.unix.ultrix:2409 Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!decwrl!vixie From: vixie@decwrl.dec.com (Paul A Vixie) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.unix.ultrix Subject: Re: Getting inside the quotes in sendmail... Message-ID: Date: 29 Dec 89 04:30:03 GMT References: <71@ucunix.SAN.UC.EDU> Sender: news@decwrl.dec.com Followup-To: comp.mail.sendmail Organization: DEC Western Research Lab Lines: 32 In-reply-to: rainwatr@ucunix.SAN.UC.EDU's message of 1 Dec 89 17:10:48 GMT There is not a good way to get inside of quoted strings. To sendmail's parser, a "quoted string" looks like a single token, which means that it will for example match $- and show up in $1 or whatever. This is a boon if you are trying to encapsulate a very-foriegn address in a way that guarantees that sendmail will leave it alone. It is a pain when you want to poke at the address. Standard sendmail has an "s" mailer flag that lets you strip off the quotes when you submit the message to an outgoing mailer. One thing you could do as a workaround is to submit to a mailer that just reinvoked sendmail in its A=; if you said M=s, the next round of sendmail process- ing would not see the quotes. This is a performance hog as well as very inelegant. I was running into this same problem on the DECWRL gateway recently, and my solution was to hack the sendmail source (which is freely available from Berkeley, UUNET, DECWRL, and a lot of other places). What I did was to notice, at the end of a given rule, that the address being rewritten had dwindled to a single argument and that that argument was a quoted string. In that event I strip off the quotes and re-tokenize the result. Since DECnet/mail11 insists on sending me things like DECWRL::"foo@baz", quotes and all, it fell to me only to strip off the DECWRL:: and my hacked sendmail binary pulled off the quotes automagically. Don't try this at home :-).. Paul Vixie DEC WRL -- Paul Vixie Work: vixie@decwrl.dec.com decwrl!vixie +1 415 853 6600 Play: paul@vixie.sf.ca.us vixie!paul +1 415 864 7013