[net.mail.headers] Sendmail problem: UUCP headers

dglasser%YALE-BULLDOG@YALE.ARPA (Dan Glasser) (08/09/84)

    I'm having a problem getting sendmail to properly rewrite headers
on messages going out to UUCP.  Let's say that I compose a message
with the following header fields:

	From: dglasser
	To: decvax!foo, apollo!bar
	Cc: decvax!harpo!blah

    The copy of the message spooled for decvax!foo and decvax!harpo!blah
should have the headers rewritten as follows:

	From: yale!dglasser
	To: foo, yale!apollo!bar
	Cc: harpo!blah

    The copy of the message spooled for apollo!bar should have the
headers rewritten as follows:

	From: yale!dglasser
	To: yale!decvax!foo, bar
	Cc: yale!decvax!harpo!blah

    In other words, what we want to do is the following:

	1) Prepend "yale!" to the sender address.
	2) For recipient address a!b!c:
	   a) For copies of the message going to a, strip "a!"
	   b) For copies of the message NOT going to a, prepend "yale!".


    Now, I have two important questions:

    1) Is my description of how the headers should be rewritten correct?
       (I think it is, but I'd be interested to hear disagreements)
    2) Has anyone successfully implemented this sort of rewriting in
       sendmail?  (I tried doing it by using the $h macro in the UUCP
       recipient rewriting ruleset, but it didn't work)


					Danny Glasser

					decvax!yale!dglasser
					(formerly yale-comix!dglasser)

					Glasser-Daniel@YALE.ARPA

mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (08/11/84)

No, that's not "the right thing" to do.

Of course, I should mention that RFC822 requires that all such
addresses in mail headers (From, To, Cc, etc) should be in the
	user@domain
form, so that nobody has to go around rewriting them.  So to
conform to 822, you should be sending out @ addresses.  (This
is the direction being taken by the UUCP project.  Having to
change headers at every machine the mail passes through is an
ugly proposition which is best avoided.)

According to "de-facto" convention, there really aren't any rules.
Any given machine does pretty much whatever it wants.  So by this
rule, I suppose you're fine too.

However, some software takes the position that addresses without
@'s in them are as typed on the sending host, and must be interpreted
relative to that host.  Thus if you send mail to
	decvax!foo
and it arrives on decvax reading
	To: foo
there will be software that will assume this means "foo on host yale".
(Assuming yale sent it.)

	Mark