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From: wcf@psuhcx.psu.edu (Bill Fenner)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,comp.mail.headers
Subject: Re: Real data to support my claim that '-d sun' is the way to go.
Message-ID: <327@psuhcx.psu.edu>
Date: 9 Aug 88 22:11:29 GMT
References: <3703@palo-alto.DEC.COM> <10139@g.ms.uky.edu> <3721@palo-alto.DEC.COM> <10141@g.ms.uky.edu> <63372@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: wcf@psuhcx (Bill Fenner)
Organization: Penn State University
Lines: 54

In article <63372@sun.uucp> nowicki%rose@Sun.COM (Bill Nowicki) writes:
|In article <10141@g.ms.uky.edu>, david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) writes:
|> I am curious why nobody from Sun is here defending their honor.
|> Yoo Hoo!  Anybody home at Sun?  Anybody wanna defend their sendmail
|> configuration there?
|
|Sure, we are home, but only have time to deal with Usenet flames about
|Unfortunately your claim that "all rewriting of From: lines is wrong"
|is not correct unless EVERYONE is doing UUCP routing.  For example,
|consider:
|
|	siteA --uucp--> sun --uucp--> siteB
|
|The From: line starts out as "From: siteA!user", and we rewrite it
|as "From: siteA!user@Sun.COM", which then gets rewritten going out
|as "From: sun!siteA!user".  The flamers are saying this is "RUDE".
|But if we did NOT do it, then when the recipient at siteB replied
|to the message, it would fail unless siteB were running UUCP routing
|software.  Since the standard UUCP software from AT&T (AND BERKELEY!!)
|DOES NOT support UUCP routing, this is usually not the case.  Thus we
|try to be conservative, so that the recipient can reply if they do
|UUCP routing or not. Since almost all of our mail is either directly
|to us, or relayed through one hop, or relayed from all machines
|that rewrite the header (i.e. standard Sun-issue software), we chose
|to have a policy that causes these paths to generate replyable headers.
The From_ line behaviour is exactly what he is describing.  Unfortunately,
applying From_ line behaviour to From: lines mess things up badly.

|
|As you discovered, if you are NOT a direct UUCP neighbor of Sun,
|but instead relay through a site that does NOT rewrite, e.g.:
|
|	siteA --uucp--> siteB --uucp--> sun --Internet--> siteC
|
|Then our scheme breaks down.  My response is that "siteB" is at fault,
|since it did not rewrite the From: line as "siteB!siteA!user".  If it
No, but it most likely rewrote the From_ line as siteB!siteA!user.  I have
yet to see a host that improperly rewrote (or didn't rewrite) the From_
line.

The From_ line *should* have an accurate indication of the path the message
took and how to get back where it came from, unless it goes through a host
like psuvax1 which breaks the From_ line.

By the From_ line I mean the line that says

From wcf (date) remote from psuhcx

  Bill
-- 
    Bitnet: wcf@psuhcx.bitnet     Bill Fenner     |
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