Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!ucsd!brian From: brian@ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: "From:" vs. "From_" Message-ID: <1297@ucsd.EDU> Date: 4 Dec 88 18:44:45 GMT References: <1227@vsi1.UUCP> <871@acer.stl.stc.co.uk> <944@dlhpedg.co.uk> <1296@ucsd.EDU>Reply-To: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor) Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd. Lines: 31 The point is that pacbell, like many many other uucp-world-only hosts, isn't running the standard sendmail mailer, nor a mailer which understands From: lines. The uucp standard is to use and update the "From " line, and since pacbell is a uucp-world-only site (for now, anyway), they don't see any need to do anything about what (to them) is a meaningless line in the header. And I can't fault them for their logic, only for their world view. My comment "there it stands" represents that Dave St. Pierre and I have agreed to disagree, not that no further words can be said on the subject. Since we at UCSD gateway between uucp, bitnet, span, and the internet, and thus live in the uucp, decnet, and RFC822 worlds, the way we handle From: lines is somewhat complicated, but the relevant part is: if the From: line has an '@domain' in it, leave it alone, else if the mail is going out via uucp, then prepend 'ucsd!' to it. else append '@ucsd.edu' to it. There are additional rules having to do with hiding local campus machine names, and other network vagaries, but you get the idea. I think this does the most practically-correct thing, rather than hope for some change to a massive base of installed software that is already mostly compliant to RFC822. Brian Kantor UCSD Office of Academic Computing Academic Network Operations Group UCSD B-028, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA brian@ucsd.edu ucsd!brian BRIAN@UCSD