stevenm (03/04/83)
I am having a real problem with replying to mail sent me over the network. It seems that any mail which goes through 'ucbvax', 'decvax', 'cbosg', 'ihnss' and a number of other places winds up with bogus addresses of the following form: From: tektronix!ucbcad!burl!lda@floyd.uucp (This is presumably ucbcad!floyd!burl) I can sometimes figure out how to return mail to these people, but my mailer completely throws up, generating To: tektronix!ucbcad!burl!lda at FLOYD.UUCP which doesn't work at all. I have no idea what the path to these people are: From: tektronix!ucbcad!harpo!hou5f!dmk@decvax.uucp From: teklabs!decvax!ucbvax!inuxc!nwuxc!otuxa!jlc@ihnss.uucp From: tektronix!teklabs!ucbvax!rvax.mailer-daemon@unmvax.uucp These are not the worst. I have gotten messages with two or more '@' in them, and messages with random mixtures of '@' and '!', e.g. 'teklabs!ucbvax!person@site1!site2@decvax.uucp' This is hopeless. Any suggestions? S. McGeady Tektronix, Inc. ucbvax!teklabs!stevenm decvax!teklabs!stevenm tektronix!tekecs!stevenm stevenm@tektronix stevenm.tektronix@RAND-RELAY . . . . (sigh)
jim (03/11/83)
1. Ambiguous Addresses The basic problem here, I think, is that addresses involving both '!' and '@' are ambiguous. How do you parse "hostA!user@hostB"? It could be either (hostA!user)@hostB or hostA!(user@hostB). The approach I've taken here is to parse mail from uucp as hostA!(user@hostB), and mail from Arpanet as (hostA!user)@hostB. Then if the mail is passed on to another machine, the return address is modified according to which net it is going to. So mail originating from user@host on the Arpanet, and destined for uucp, goes out as From user@host (date) remote from uw-beaver and ends up on the destination machine as From foo!bar!baz!user@host Mail from uucp destined for Arpanet (due to Arpa imposed restrictions, only mail from certain sites and users is accepted) and arriving as From foo!bar!user ends up on Arpanet as From: foo!bar!user@uw-beaver In this way, mail passing between the two nets can usually be replied to correctly. 2. Mail Hijacked by Other Systems Some sites, most notably those running Berkeley mailers, take any mail with an '@' in it, even if it arrived via uucp, and try to parse it as an Arpanet address. So if you try to reply to my message, which arrived as From foo!bar!baz!user@host and the mail has to go through one of these sites, it won't work. If site "bar" has one of these mail systems, instead of sending it to baz!(user@host), it will try to send the mail to (baz!user)@host on the Arpanet, which is bogus. The people who wrote these mailers will claim that everyone should be using Internet addresses, which would be fine if everyone had access to Arpanet. But they don't, and at least for now it is not possible for Joe User at unixvax to send mail to Jim@beaver.arpa. I claim that, since most machines parse incoming uucp mail '!' first, it is counterproductive to randomly insert machines into the net which parse '@' first. One possible solution is for my mailer to fake up a return address which looks like a uucp address. Then instead of From foo!bar!baz!user@host we would have From foo!bar!baz!host!user even though "host" is an Arpanet host. I have not tried to do this, and anticipate that it would create lots of problems. Worst of all are those mailers, such as ucbvax's, which take a perfectly good uucp address and try to turn it into pseudo-Internet format. This is how you end up with abominations like From: teklabs!decvax!ucbvax!inuxc!nwuxc!otuxa!jlc@ihnss.uucp even though the mail never once went outside uucp. Is "jlc" located at ihnss or at otuxa? I certainly have no idea. These mailers also have a tendency to add lots of lines to your header, making it hard to tell who it came from and what the subject is. 3. Disclaimer This is not an attempt to describe how mail should work, but rather an attempt to describe how it does, in fact, work, and how I have tried to keep the mail going, at least through my machine. Constructive suggestions are welcome, flames will be forwarded to ucbvax!/dev/null, and I expect I'll be hearing from Mark Horton.
jfw (03/12/83)
In a related problem, I recently modified our local RMAIL to translate % to @ in order to permit people on uucp to mail to MIT's CHAOSNET, a translation which is done only if there are no ! signs left in the TO name. Why did I do this at all? Too many people tried to send with @ and lost at various places along the net. Hence, I chose a character I *hope* no-one else catches, and made a conditional translation for it. Sigh. Networks are such a pain. John Woods, ...!decvax!genradbo!mitccc!postmaster, ...!eagle!mitccc!postmaster, ...!floyd!mitccc!postmaster%mit-ccc%mit-mc (hee hee) or mail to `10,12s/postmaster/jfw/`...
goutal (03/16/83)
Considering the most recent articles in this group by uw-beaverton!jim and mitccc!postmaster (John Woods), I am led to suggest that *only* people whose machines are on more than one network and gate things across should intercept any punctuation other than "!". In a msg to Jim (which may or may not make it), I further suggested that such gateways themselves ought to be able to translate things like uucp-host!user@arpa-host <--> uucp-host!arpa-host!user such that all the rest of us can just use plain old uucp-style addresses and paths, and leave translation up to those who ought to know. If the uucp net someday all migrates to using NBS addresses or Internet addresses or something, then we can all do that. Till then, how bout if all use uucp addresses. Period. Will that work (if the more eager among us back off a bit)?