Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site uw-beaver
Path: utzoo!decvax!wivax!linus!allegra!eagle!mhuxt!mhuxi!mhuxa!houxm!hogpc!houti!ariel!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!jim
From: jim@uw-beaver.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: not forwarding mail
Message-ID: <654@uw-beaver>
Date: Fri, 3-Jun-83 12:46:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: uw-beaver>.654
Posted: Fri Jun  3 12:46:06 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Jun-83 01:16:52 EDT
References: <219@mit-vax.UUCP>
Organization: U of Washington Computer Science
Lines: 25

The problem of ambiguous mail addresses again rears its ugly head.

My solution has been to have /bin/rmail give precedence to the '!'.
This way, mail arriving via uucp is parsed as uucp mail.  To me this
makes the most sense, but I guess I am alone in thinking this way
because all other implementations I know of unconditionally give
precedence to '@'.  Note that mail arriving via Arpanet, ethernet, or
generated locally is still parsed with precedence to '@'.

On our system, the address given as an example by mp@mit-vax:

  eagle!mhuxt!mhuxi!mhuxa!houxm!hocda!spanky!burl!duke!sam@fau.UUCP

is translated by /bin/rmail into

  mhuxt!mhuxi!mhuxa!houxm!hocda!spanky!burl!duke!sam@fau.UUCP@eagle.uucp

and is then sent on to eagle by delivermail.  This requires only one
small change to rmail, and none at all to any other mailers, including
delivermail.

When I first implemented this, it seemed so obvious that I wondered
what was wrong with it.  Since that time we have had much less dropped
mail than before, and I still can't figure out what is wrong with the
scheme.