[net.mail] parsing name!user@host

lee@rochester.UUCP (10/31/84)

On the question of how do you parse
	foo!bar@baz

I agree with the philosophy that UUCP only sites should give higher precedence
to "!" while internet only sites should give the "@" precedence.  For the
case where a site is both on the internet and UUCP nets, I would like
to resserect a solution I saw here sometime ago.  The idea was that precedence
should be disambiguated by the source of the message.  There are two cases:

the messages arrived via UUCP:
	In this case, precedence should be given to the "!".   Imagine
	the case of foo1!foo2!user@site.  If foo1 is on the internet,
	then currently it will either refuse to forward the message to
	the internet OR it will pass it to "site" which (hopefully)
	has a UUCP connection to foo2.  I do not know of any UUCP user
	that uses the internet as a way to pass mail between UUCP sites.
	It is just too tricky.

the messages arrive via the Internet or are locally generated:
	Since the site is already on the internet, there isn't a need
	to use UUCP to get the mail to an internet site.  Therefore
	user really want to get to a site that is hooked via UUCP
	to another internet site.  Give the "@" higher precedence.

Noticing the ability of users to define their own sendmail configuration
files it should be fairly easy to implement the above suggestion.

jack@vu44.UUCP (Jack Jansen) (11/01/84)

As lee@rochester pointed out, there is a problem if you let
UUCP-only sites give precedence to !, and internet sites give
precedence to @.
Well, since there is allready the % as a low-priority @, why
not use that?
A path 'both!sitea!user%siteb' would follow the path
both->sitea->siteb, and a path
'both!sitea!user@siteb' would go through the path
both->siteb->sitea

	Jack Jansen, {seismo|philabs|decvax}!mcvax!vu44!jack
	or				       ...!vu44!htsa!jack
  "Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure"
			Oscar Wilde, 1894.
  "Most unix(tm) programmers are great masters of style"
			Jack Jansen, 1984.