gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (07/09/87)
The messages on EARN and Israeli conversion reminded me of an issue
that's worth airing. The early efforts to provide X.400 mail gateways
are not very encouraging. Here is a message I received from such
a gateway at AT&T:
Return-Path: <ihnp4!ihlpa!sft>
Received: by hoptoad.uucp (1.1/SMI-3.0DEV3)
id AA21284; Thu, 12 Mar 87 20:24:45 PST
From: ihnp4!ihlpa!sft
Message-Id: <8703130424.AA21284@hoptoad.uucp>
Received: by ihnp4.ATT.COM id AA16275; 12 Mar 87 08:07:23 CST (Thu)
Message-Version: 2
>To: /addr=ihnp4!hoptoad!gnu
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1987 08:06 CST
Message-Service: Mail
Message-Protocol: EMail
End-Of-Header:
Email-Version: 2
X-Postmark: scott.thompson attbl ih5c422 55669 3129792594 ihlpa!sft
To: hoptoad!gnu
Subject: Re: Wanted: agef program
Ua-Message-Id: <post.sft.Thu, 12 Mar 1987 08:03 CST>
End-Of-Protocol:
Thank you for the reply, but I already received a copy.
THANKS :-)
To me it looks like a core dump of a binary message header.
I asked Mark Horton about this and he said it was from an X.400
gateway and that it was unlikely that it could get fixed, e.g. to
remove all the trash headers. This must be political rather than
technical since even I can write a sed script that will fix this message
right up, and another one to insert meaningless headers on messages
going the other way. It strongly reminds me of Geoff Collyer's joke
messages that poke fun at RFC822 by inserting silly header lines.
But I think these guys are serious, and they're The Telephone Company.
--
{dasys1,ncoast,well,sun,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@ingres.berkeley.edu
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