Xref: utzoo news.admin:4211 news.sysadmin:1867 comp.mail.uucp:2482 Newsgroups: news.admin,news.sysadmin,comp.mail.uucp Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: Rewriting From: lines Message-ID: <1988Dec8.212007.17833@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <1227@vsi1.UUCP> <871@acer.stl.stc.co.uk> <944@dlhpedg.co.uk> <1296@ucsd.EDU> <10510@swan.ulowell.edu> <504@pacbell.PacBell.COM> Date: Thu, 8 Dec 88 21:20:07 GMT In article <504@pacbell.PacBell.COM> david@pacbell.PacBell.COM (David St.Pierre) writes: >System V behavior is to prepend a From_ to each message. That's it. In fact, this considerably pre-dates System V, and RFC822 (although not its predecessors) as well. This is the *standard* mailer behavior for uucp mail, dating back to V7. Any mailer that can't cope with other mailers doing it has broken backward compatibility, a very stupid thing to do in this network. >... Or hack another flag into sendmail (:-) to >continually consolidate From_ lines. Actually, the only program that should ever consolidate From_ lines is the user agent at the receiver. Consolidation removes information, and should not be done gratuitously by relay sites. (We won't even mention that 4.1 and, I think, all its successors, have bugs in the consolidation code...) Alas, there are a lot of misguided mailers that do consolidation at the drop of a hat... -- SunOSish, adj: requiring | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 32-bit bug numbers. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu