Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site peora.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxt!houxm!vax135!petsd!peora!jer From: jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) Newsgroups: net.mail Subject: Re: More thoughts on mail relays Message-ID: <1772@peora.UUCP> Date: Mon, 4-Nov-85 09:29:45 EST Article-I.D.: peora.1772 Posted: Mon Nov 4 09:29:45 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 5-Nov-85 09:29:41 EST References: <1813@umcp-cs.UUCP> <1746@peora.UUCP> <909@plus5.UUCP> <1761@peora.UUCP> <912@plus5.UUCP> Organization: Perkin-Elmer SDC, Orlando, Fl. Lines: 80 > JER, you are certainly correct that this issue has been "discussed" far > too much. However, there are some points you (re)state to which I choose > to examine. Gee, Hokey, if you are going to introduce some new stuff, that's fine. > Are you saying that there are only a few sites running sendmail? Are you > inviting them to identify themselves in order to substantiate their number? Only if you let all the non-sendmail sites do so too... :-) it's a matter of proportion, not numbers. > Does not! So there. Here is a contrived example: wucs!kurt sends me mail > via seismo. Seismo puts the thing into 822 format before sending it to me. > I see wucs!kurt@seismo. I reply, and being a good bangist, send it to wucs, > which then sends the mail to kurt@seismo. Wrong. I speak with both wucs > and seismo. How do I choose? I don't recall *ever* seeing any real-world > solution to this problem. Seismo did it wrong! (Now, don't get mad, Seismo-folks, I didn't say you'd really do it this way...) They should have written kurt@wucs.UUCP. It's the responsibility of the nameservers on the path back to figure out how to get it to wucs. The fact that it came through Seismo coming here is of no interest at all; besides, you can look in the Received: lines if you want to know. The From: line should tell the mailbox name and the system the message came from; that's all you know to reply, and all you need to know. >> petsd!vax135!ucbvax!sam@slowvax.ARPA > You are semantically disambiguating the beast. How do you know that > ucbvax!sam didn't route the mail via slowvax.ARPA to vax135? Because, if it's in the UUCP routing strings, it's not an RFC822 address, and so "!" has precedence. If it's in the From: line of the message, it is an RFC822 address (since it's in the message text, which is what RFC822 is for), and so "@" has precedence. You're right; unambiguous grammars generate syntactically unambiguous languages, and the semantics of the tokens are already unambiguous, so the semantics are unambiguous. {What? Don't like two different languages? What's all this "RCPT TO" stuff I keep reading about here?} > Since RFC822 compliance can't be enforced on arbitrary UUCP sites, we have to > have a way to transport mail between sites. The *only* thing I am advocating > is the use of strict bang format when shuffling mail between UUCP sites. Me too! But here again, standard UUCP mail doesn't know anything about anything in the message text except for "From_" lines. However, the RFC822 does let you rewrite the headers "to force data to conform to a network's local conventions". Thereby "the 'next' network's local idiosyncrasies are imposed on the message". I wish we could stay away from situations, in the UUCP mail network, in which machines have to read the headers on the message text, since we started out with only one (very hard to deal with) such header, and could put on clean addresses without causing any problems. However, I won't argue with you on this; our mailer handles it fine, and I don't have to deal with yours! When it leaves here, actually it has both... the RFC-822 address in the, and the UUCP path that was used in the . (Not in the From: line, though. How do I know the path from there to here?) Except when I don't get replies, which is what the mung-resistant (not recognized by Sendmail) headers are for. > user aliases (not everybody can afford the 3-4 Mbytes occupied > by all the MH software), mail to files, mail to pipes, decent > forwarding capabilities, and local "services" (sending mail to > the lineprinter, for example). MH.5 supports all of these. However, you're right, the software is very large; but the program that does all it (post) is probably much smaller than Sendmail. (Actually I don't know if they handle "mail to pipes" or not.) Anyhow, what I am arguing for/about here are not the programs in the roles sendmail and post occupy, but rather the simple transport-level software. Those can be, and are, very small. -- Shyy-Anzr: J. Eric Roskos UUCP: Ofc: ..!{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!vax135!petsd!peora!jer Home: ..!{decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!vax135!petsd!peora!jerpc!jer US Mail: MS 795; Perkin-Elmer SDC; 2486 Sand Lake Road, Orlando, FL 32809-7642