Xref: utzoo comp.mail.misc:1084 comp.mail.uucp:1439 comp.sources.d:2455
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!tness7!killer!mit-eddie!rutgers!ukma!david
From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,comp.mail.uucp,comp.mail.sendmail,comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: routing problem with sendmail/smail
Keywords: mail,smail,sendmail,route
Message-ID: <9938@g.ms.uky.edu>
Date: 12 Jul 88 15:45:06 GMT
References: <589@ndcheg.cheg.nd.edu> <426@ncar.ucar.edu>
Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae)
Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences
Lines: 44

In article <426@ncar.ucar.edu> woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) writes:
>In article <589@ndcheg.cheg.nd.edu> evan@ndcheg.cheg.nd.edu (Evan Bauman) writes:
>>Since this is coming in via uucp, and not sendmail, rmail (which
>>is really smail in disguise!) assumes that this is mail bound for
>>another uucp link and bypasses sendmail completely.
>... The only fix I was able to come up with is the following
>hack to main.c, which causes sendmail to be called EVERY TIME the program
>is called as "rmail". This adds an extra load, because sendmail may very
>well decide to hand the message back to smail again (but it would be called
>as "smail", not "rmail", so there won't be a loop). However it does fix the
>problem of local-etherhost!user getting bounced and as a side effect allows
>your mail host to accept and route messages of the form host.domain!user
...

While this is *a* solution I don't think it's the best and it also introduces
a misfeature.

The misfeature is that you will now be unable -- at least in Evan's case --
to route mail to the "other" jupiter.  That is, unless you're willing
to require your users to type in some!long!path!which!ends!in!the!other!jupiter.
I'm not willing to require my users to do that -- instead I've always tried
to make it as easy for them (and me) as possible by having the ability
to type just user@host.uucp and the system gets the mail to them.

If you do something to allow local-etherhost!user as an address, and one
of your local-etherhosts is "jupiter", then mail to jupiter!user or
user@jupiter will end up at the local-etherhost.  NOT at the real
jupiter as intended (maybe intended).

As I see it the best solution is to arrange somehow for the local-etherhost
to always be referred to by the full.domain.name.  Then there is no
confusion because there is no name conflict.

An example of something else I do here.  My home machine is a 3b1 on
which I've installed smail 2.5.  I've configured that smail to use
ukma as the smart-host and the paths file on my system ONLY mentions
ukma.  I quite frequently use user@full.domain.name addresses on this
machine and it turns that into ukma!full.domain.name!user for me
and ships it off.
-- 
<---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy                         
<---- ska: David le casse\*'      {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<----
<---- Today is the yesterday you worried about tomorrow.