egisin@orchid.UUCP (04/17/87)
I got some mail from UofT that came via RSCS.
Part of the header follows:
From mailer@utorgpu.bitnet Thu Apr 16 16:30:02 1987
Received: from watmath.uucp by orchid; Thu, 16 Apr 87 16:30:02 EDT
Received: from watmath.uucp by watdragon; Thu, 16 Apr 87 16:28:57 EDT
Redirected-From: watmath.uucp
Received: from utzoo by gpu.utcs.toronto.edu via phone with UUCP id AA02927;
Thu, 16 Apr 87 16:29:28 EDT
Date: Thu, 16 Apr 87 16:29:28 EDT
From: henry@utzoo
Message-Id: <8704162029.AA02927@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu>
To: egisin@watmath
The body of the message had empty lines turned into lines
consisting of 3 or 4 blanks, typical of rscs.
My first complaint is that the rscs mailers did not
insert Received lines, so I don't know how the mail was routed.
One of the mailers also failed to rewrite the From address
to include a top level domain, either .uucp or .toronto.edu.
The second complaint is that rscs is known for its inability to
transfer text files between ascii systems without mangling them.
Source code ususally has to be encoded before it can be sent
reliably over a rscs link. The most common way to do this
is with uuencode, and even that doesn't work with the standard
Unix uuencode because rscs strips trailing blanks from lines.
I assume this routing was done for economical reasons,
but I think it will cause a lot of problems for users.rayan@utegc.UUCP (04/18/87)
In article <7004@orchid.UUCP> egisin@orchid.UUCP (Eric Gisin) writes:
# My first complaint is that the rscs mailers did not
# insert Received lines, so I don't know how the mail was routed.
The routing was utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!egisin, according to logs.
# One of the mailers also failed to rewrite the From address
# to include a top level domain, either .uucp or .toronto.edu.
It could be that Henry sent it looking like that. In any case, the mailer
on utgpu won't touch such stuff going to RSCS except in the absence of '@'.
# The second complaint is that rscs is known for its inability to
# transfer text files between ascii systems without mangling them.
There has been talk of working around this in a commonly agreed-upon way...
# I assume this routing was done for economical reasons,
# but I think it will cause a lot of problems for users.
It would if that was the routing used to Waterloo, but it isn't. It's
the routing used to host 'water' which is a NetNorth node. The problem
is that the Path: line of some news article was used to reply, instead of
another more proper route. This has happened in the reverse direction
from Waterloo to Toronto too. The mailer on water is defined to receive
messages in PUNCH format, and that is the reason for the 4-blanks-in-an-
empty-line symptom. If one could send it NETDATA format, that little
problem would go away. It would also stop making vanilla sendmail think
that part of the message is really part of the header.
rayan
--
Rayan Zachariassen
AI group, University of Torontohenry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (04/19/87)
> # One of the mailers also failed to rewrite the From address > # to include a top level domain, either .uucp or .toronto.edu. > > It could be that Henry sent it looking like that. It's not clear whether the "From " line(s) or the "From:" line is being discussed. When it left here, it would have had no "From:" line and a "From henry ... remote from utzoo" line, conforming to the old uucp mail standard, although possibly not to the preconceptions of some RFC822-based mailers. > # I assume this routing was done for economical reasons, > # but I think it will cause a lot of problems for users. > > It would if that was the routing used to Waterloo, but it isn't. It's > the routing used to host 'water' which is a NetNorth node. The problem > is that the Path: line of some news article was used to reply, instead of > another more proper route... What happened, actually, was that I looked at the Path: and said "I wonder how well that would work as a return route". It wasn't the result of systematic misrouting by a mailer, although it's easy to envision that sort of thing happening with primitive mailers, now that the bulk of our news comes in via NetNorth... -- "We must choose: the stars or Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology the dust. Which shall it be?" {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry