R.LARSON%FNS1@ECLA.USC.EDU (Bob Larson) (11/10/87)
Some uucp mail sites are trying to get smarter about how to route
things, and wind up messing things up. Apperently they realize that
oberon.usc.edu (citvax!oberon) is willing to gateway mail to the
.usc.edu domain, so they create a uucp path to forward the mail to
oberon. However, many (most?) of the intermediate sites are also on
the arpanet, and take @ at higher presidence than ! when routing
mail. The mail gets to my site, but the address is not correct
(contians multiple !) and gets rejected. The rejection message then
gets rejected because it was converted to upper case (my mailer does
this to host names and local addresses) and uucp is case sensitive.
The mail does get to the correct place, since the rejected rejection
is delivered to a human (me). (I'm postmaster and info-prime-request
as well as r.larson)
Is there any solution to this problem? (Fixing my mailer not to
uppercase the rejection just throws it at someon else.)
Here is an example header: (The @ and % are reversed in the original
To: address, but I've got others without that problem.)
cup.portal.com is not the only site guilty of this.
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Message-Id: <8711070218.AA07458@sun.Sun.COM>
To: <MAILMAN%FNS1.#USCnet@ECLA.USC.EDU>
----- Transcript of session follows -----
bad system name: PORTAL
uux failed. code 68
550 <PORTAL!CUP.PORTAL.COM!TMANOS>... Host unknown
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Date: Fri, 06 Nov 87 17:46:48 PST
From: The Mailman <Mailman%FNS1@ECLA.USC.EDU>
To: <PORTAL!CUP.PORTAL.COM!TMANOS%SUN.COM@ECLA.USC.EDU>
Subject: Message failure.
sun!lll-lcc!rutgers!cit-vax!oberon!info-prime-request@FNS1: Unknown mailbox!
-----------
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From: portal!cup.portal.com!tmanos@Sun.COM
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To: info-prime-request@fns1%ecla.usc.edu
Subject: Back issues
Lines: 11
Date: Fri Nov 6 17:03:13 1987
Message-Id: <8711061703.1.121@cup.portal.com>
X-Origin: The Portal System (TM)
X-Possible-Reply-Path: tmanos@cup.portal.com
X-Possible-Reply-Path: sun!portal!cup.portal.com!tmanosOWENSJ%VTVM1.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU (John Owens) (11/16/87)
>However, many (most?) of the intermediate sites are also on >the arpanet, and take @ at higher presidence than ! when routing >mail. The mail gets to my site, but the address is not correct >(contians multiple !) and gets rejected. > . . . >Here is an example header: (The @ and % are reversed in the original >To: address, but I've got others without that problem.) The problem in this case is that while there are ways to handle @-form addresses over UUCP (mail to R.LARSON@FNS1.USC.EDU, if that were a valid address, would be sent via rmail sun!lll-lcc!rutgers!cit-vax!oberon!fns1.usc.edu!r.larson and there would be no problem with it arriving (although what the headers would look like when it got there....)), there's not yet a good way to handle mixed %-@ addresses (or route-addrs). R.LARSON%FNS1@ECLA.USC.EDU would become rmail sun!lll-lcc!rutgers!cit-vax!oberon!ecla.usc.edu!r.larson%fns1 and while there are rules about !-vs-@ (@ takes precedence), there are no rules about !-vs-%. If anyone along the way gives the % precendence, it's lost. With the @-% switch in the message you gave, it gets even worse. I can't tell whether the original user typed in like that or perhaps typed multiple @-signs or something, but since the path was still in the envelope recipient, complete with its first part, sun, we can tell that the rmail command passed from portal to sun ended in either @ecla.usc.edu or %ecla.usc.edu, causing sun to send it via SMTP, never stripping anything off of the path, *and never sending it through any intermediate sites*. (If it had, those parts of the path would have been successively stripped off of the rmail line.) The fix here would have to be in portal's handling of %'s and @'s.... -John Owens Virginia Tech Communications Network Services OWENSJ@VTVM1.BITNET owens@vtopus.cs.vt.edu +1 703 961 7827 john@xanth.UUCP