roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (10/25/88)
What would you do if you saw the following on a To: line?
Roy Smith <philabs.philips.com.weiser.pa@xerox.com (Roy Smith)>
I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean, but it certainly doesn't
mean me. Actually, the odd part is that somehow it does mean me because it
got to me (although as part of a several-bounce error message). Where
would you start if you wanted to try to parse this, or would you just say
it's illegal and throw up your hands?
--
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net
"The connector is the network"chet@pirate.CWRU.EDU (Chet Ramey) (10/26/88)
In article <3566@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes: > What would you do if you saw the following on a To: line? >Roy Smith <philabs.philips.com.weiser.pa@xerox.com (Roy Smith)> I would (and so would my sendmail.cf) send the whole mess to Xerox and let them deal with it. This is a strict interpretation of RFC-822. >Where would you start if you wanted to try to parse this, or would you just >say it's illegal and throw up your hands? If I wanted to parse it, I'd take whatever's between the brackets, throw out the comments, and work on what's left. (And what is a sendmail.cf, if not the embodiment of it's creator's ideas about mail routing and addressing? :-) So, if you feed it through ruleset 3, it'll come back as philabs.philips.com.weiser.pa<@xerox.com> so that seems OK so far (of course, it may not be what was intended). Then try to resolve xerox.com, since we don't touch the local part, and send it off to them (hell, for all I know, Grapevine might actually make that local part into something useful when it gets there). Chet Ramey Network Operations Group, CWRU chet@cwjcc.CWRU.EDU Chet Ramey chet@cwjcc.CWRU.EDU Network Management Group chet@alpha.CES.CWRU.EDU Andrew R. Jennings Computing Center chet@pirate.CWRU.EDU Case Western Reserve University
david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) (10/26/88)
In article <3566@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes: > > What would you do if you saw the following on a To: line? > >Roy Smith <philabs.philips.com.weiser.pa@xerox.com (Roy Smith)> Actually this isn't too bad ... The embedded comment is a little strange but is legal. Of course, we all know that "philabs.philips.com.weiser.pa" is really a couple of things concatenated together. The tail part of that is (as I recall) Mark Weiser's name & "domain" within Xerox. The rest is domain name for part of philips.com ... BUT, syntactically this address is perfectly correct. It is only wrong in its SEMANTICS. What our system here would do? Well, I'm assuming for the moment that MMDF's address parser is correct enough to handle that right. I believe that it is ... So anyway, we'd pass it over to xerox.com and it's their problem to figure out who to give it to... -- <-- David Herron; an MMDF guy <david@ms.uky.edu> <-- ska: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <-- <-- Controlled anarchy -- the essence of the net.
cfe+@andrew.cmu.edu (Craig F. Everhart) (10/26/88)
I could also take
Roy Smith <philabs.philips.com.weiser.pa@xerox.com (Roy Smith)>
and, by hand, figure that maybe philabs.philips.com added itself as a source
route (something like <@philabs.philips.com:weiser.pa@xerox.com>), then
somebody's brain-dead (or ancient) sendmail.cf turned the colon into a dot,
giving something like what you saw. If I believed that, I'd forward a report of
the thing to the postmasters at philabs.philips.com and whatever other routing
sites had been added in the Received: lines.
Craig Everhart
Andrew message system