Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!MADISON@vms.ecs.rpi.edu
From: madison@vms.ecs.rpi.edu (Matt Madison)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers
Subject: Mild flame about (some) UNIX mailers
Message-ID: <00932CA6.30EE8E00@vms.ecs.rpi.edu>
Date: 24 Feb 90 20:50:27 GMT
Reply-To: madison@vms.ecs.rpi.edu (Matt Madison)
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
Lines: 47

Having just finished writing some new E-mail software for our VMS system,
I have spent several hours studying both RFC 821 and RFC 822 to ensure that
this software complies with these standards.  After all, these standards
are used by all the systems on the Internet, right?

As soon as this software went into production use, we started experiencing
problems exchanging mail with (you guessed it) some UNIX systems on our
network (and elsewhere).  There have been three problems so far, and trivial
though they may be, they have been rather aggravating.

Problem 1.  In implementing a gateway between VMS MAIL coming in over
DECnet and SMTP, my software generates return addresses of the form
<"node::user"@domain>.  The quotation marks are necessary because colons
are considered "special" by RFC 822.  This immediately started to cause
problems because (I'm told) sendmail by default strips quotation marks
from the user portion of an address.  So when UNIX users tried to reply
to messages sent from my system, the replies would be rejected by my
SMTP server becuase <node::user@domain> is not valid RFC 822.

Problem 2.  RFC 821 states that all lines sent should be terminated with a
carriage return/line feed sequence.  It turns out that some UNIX-based
SMTP implementations do not adhere to this and by default terminate lines
simply with line feeds.  Now, I can understand this behaviour in older UNIX
implementations.  But we're talking recent versions of ULTRIX and SGI's
UNIX (whatever it's called)!

Problem 3.  Some UNIX mail systems appear to generate return addresses of
the form

       real name <user@domain>

Where "real name" is simply pulled from the passwd file (or wherever this
information is obtained on UNIX systems), without verifying that it can be
left unquoted and still comply with RFC 822.  This means that anyone who has
included their middle initial with their name, with a dot, will have a
return address that violates the standard (dots are not allowed in the
leading phrase before the address).  Parsing 822-compliant addresses is
complicated enough without having to deal with crap like this.

What really burns me up about this, is that it's considered _my_ fault that
this stuff doesn't work!  Argh.
--
Matthew Madison, Systems Programmer  | "First they built the world's standard.
Engineering Computing Services       |  Then they added standards no one else
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute     |  had."  - an ad for SCO Xenix
Troy, New York 12180-3590 USA        |
   madison@vms.ecs.rpi.edu