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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