jonah@deepthot.UUCP (Jeff Lee) (06/23/85)
It seems as though a lot of problems arise when mail crosses between
domains en-route to its destination. Has anyone ever proposed any
standard formats for specifying addresses in other target domains?
If not, then what is everbody doing in these situations?
--
jonah (Jeff Lee @ Dept. of Comp. Sci., The University of Western Ontario)
UUCP: ...!decvax!{utzoo|watmath}!deepthot!jonah
MLNET: jonah@deepthot.UWOhokey@plus5.UUCP (Hokey) (06/25/85)
In general, one should provide as little routing information as possible.
This implies that one should send mail to an address (rather than a route).
This also implies that the net gateways should be responsible for altering
the headers and/or routing information as they see fit (again, this should
be kept to a minimum).
This is not often easy. It requires knowing where the "closest" smart mailer
is. (If any word is wrong at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.)
It is dangerous to use hybrid (mixed ! and @) routes in UUCP land, as there
is no consistent precedence associated with the network operators. This is
not true for RFC822 header fields, but hybrids are dangerous here as well,
because many sendmail sites still prepend their site name in the From: lines.
A fix to this problem has been posted, but not very many sites seem to have
installed it.
From UUCP land, gateways should be able to accept mail sent to dom.ain!user
(e.g.: site.arpa!user, or site.att.uucp!user). I know that the DEC Engineering
Net gateways accept this form, and I know several Arpa gateways do as well.
These Arpa gateways also accept mail to site.csnet!user (no csnet-relay is
needed). I do not know about the BITNET gateways.
There are, of course, people who disagree with what I say.
In any event, expect all hell to break loose on 15 July, when the Internet
converts from .arpa to .{edu,com,gov,mil,oth} stuff, and isolates the domain
name from the transport mechanism.
--
Hokey ..ihnp4!plus5!hokey
314-725-9492zben@umd5.UUCP (06/29/85)
In article <592@deepthot.UUCP> jonah@deepthot.UUCP (Jeff Lee) writes: >It seems as though a lot of problems arise when mail crosses between >domains en-route to its destination. Has anyone ever proposed any >standard formats for specifying addresses in other target domains? >If not, then what is everbody doing in these situations? >jonah (Jeff Lee @ Dept. of Comp. Sci., The University of Western Ontario) >UUCP: ...!decvax!{utzoo|watmath}!deepthot!jonah >MLNET: jonah@deepthot.UWO We are using % as a "masked @ sign" for this application. An address could, for example, be expressed as: zben%umd5%umd2@umda When umda gets it, it strips its name and changes the rightmost % to @: zben%umd5@umd2 Similarly, umd2 changes it to: zben@umd5 and I eventually get the message. Within the context of RFC822, a suggestion is to use the doublequoted string for this. Note that there is a thing in the sendmail configuration file that says "this is a final delivery". If set, then doublequotes are removed from the address before passing it to the server. Thus one could in some circumstances use something like: "zben@umd5"@umd2 although we do not support this at the present time. There seem to be both pro and con arguments on this, and I am going to let it ferment for awhile before I do anything with it... -- Ben Cranston ...{seismo!umcp-cs,ihnp4!rlgvax}!cvl!umd5!zben zben@umd2.ARPA