[net.mail] Brain Damaged Mail Software -- Is there any hope?

mojo@kepler.UUCP (Morris Jones) (08/25/85)

Our site is not only a binary license Unisoft V7 facility, we have little
or no hope of upgrading our system.  Netcom, the makers of the Cosmos
Antares line of 68000 boxes, no longer makes them.  Braegen has written
to cancel our service contract even.

Our mailer cannot cope with hyphens, at-signs, or dots in a mail path.
That really shouldn't be a big deal, but I just read the list of
moderators of news groups, and there are a few that go to hyphenated
mail addresses.  Hence we can never mail postings to those moderators.
And we can't get any mail past (for instance) lll-crg.  Plus uuxqt
dumps core on a path longer than about 100 characters.

All the religious arguments about mail address syntax really become
academic in such an environment.

It's all very discouraging.

We're looking into the honey danber package to help out our limping
uucp system, but I haven't seen the description of the package yet
from AT&T, and no one has ever mentioned that it contains any mail
software, so I assume it doesn't.  (By the way, AT&T's price for the
"Basic Networking Utilities" package is $3,000 for the first CPU, $1,000
for each additional.  Call 1-800-828-UNIX.)

So how is the UUCP Project coming along?  Is the name police going to
knock on our door and tell us to change the names of our systems or get
off the net?  Actually, I'm continuing on under the assumption that the
UUCP Project is going to give us some management over our domain so that
only the "micropro" name needs to be public.  After all, micropro!kepler!mojo
is probably a unique address.

Should I be encouraged?  Should I stop worrying?

-- 
Mojo
... Morris Jones, MicroPro Product Development
{dual,ptsfa,hplabs}!well!micropro!kepler!mojo

peter@graffiti.UUCP (Peter da Silva) (08/31/85)

> Our mailer cannot cope with hyphens, at-signs, or dots in a mail path.
> That really shouldn't be a big deal, but I just read the list of
> moderators of news groups, and there are a few that go to hyphenated
> mail addresses.  Hence we can never mail postings to those moderators.
> And we can't get any mail past (for instance) lll-crg.  Plus uuxqt
> dumps core on a path longer than about 100 characters.

I can help... our site name is hyd-ptd. We're not a major link (more like
a leaf), but I have been considering changing to hydril.

Our mailer, incidentally, is nearly as braindamaged as yours. We do
asscept funny characters but can't pass them on anywhere.

Question to the net: I hear someone wrote a PD mailer called "smail". Peter
Honeyman has been calling it nasty names, but it can't be worse than V7
rmail, and I can always yank the cutesy stuff. Anybody got a pointer for this?