Xref: utzoo news.admin:4249 news.sysadmin:1901 comp.mail.uucp:2502 Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!agate!ucbvax!ucsd!brian From: brian@ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor) Newsgroups: news.admin,news.sysadmin,comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Rewriting From: lines Message-ID: <1306@ucsd.EDU> Date: 9 Dec 88 18:38:32 GMT 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> Reply-To: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor) Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd. Lines: 43 In article <504@pacbell.PacBell.COM> david@pacbell.PacBell.COM (David St.Pierre) writes: >Um Brian, you're taking liberty with what I said. I didn't say I was >doing the right thing - I did say that traditional System V mailers >didn't attempt to support RFC822 and didn't really support "headers". You're right, David, and I apologize for misquoting you - I must have some missing bits in the wetware. But as we discussed over a beer two days ago, the difficulties of combining two networks with essentially different addressing semantics make any definitive answer difficult to achieve. I hope your suggestion to ames helps this situation. (BTW, wasn't it nice of Sun and AT&T to pay for the drinks and munchies while we discussed this in person?) The key here is that the From: line in a uucp world is a strange beastie: it has no meaning to sites which run pure uucp mail. Yet this mail network is no longer pure uucp; even if it only used uucp as a transport mechanism, the thousands of sites using sendmail (even those not connected to the internet) are using internet semantics and we must, as a practical matter, cope with that. In the pure uucp world, there are no addresses, there are only paths. In the internet world, there are normally no paths, just addresses. When you mix these worlds together, you get problems, and to solve the problem you have to process the address according to the semantics which apply. Luckily, it is often possible to decide which is the correct set of rules, because the addresses/paths contain clues which most of the time will allow you to guess correctly whether what you are looking at is an address or a path. And that's what we do with From: lines, and that's what I advocate others to do with From: lines. Those who say that one should never touch the contents of a From: line would seem to be those who believe that the From: line always contains an address. Regrettably, that is not always true, and sometimes the From: line contains a path, which must, by definition, be updated. Brian Kantor UCSD Postmaster UCSD Office of Academic Computing UCSD B-028, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA brian@ucsd.edu BRIAN@UCSD ucsd!brian