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