mike@whutt.UUCP (BALDWIN) (08/09/88)
> siteA --uucp--> siteB --uucp--> sun --Internet--> siteC > > Then our scheme breaks down. My response is that "siteB" is at fault, > since it did not rewrite the From: line as "siteB!siteA!user". But you say that siteB is a UUCP site. Vanilla UUCP sites do NOT rewrite From: lines. They rewrite From_ lines (only). We have (at least) two mail standards here. Vanilla UUCP has *only* From_ lines and bang syntax. No From:, no To:, no domains. The Internet has RFC-822 and domains, and no From_ and no bangs. Unfortunately, some mail software wants to treat UUCP mail as Internet mail. Berkeley mail (aka mailx), for example, puts To: and Cc: lines in mail, explicitly NOT in RFC-822 format (no commas, no @ signs). If this is dumped into a UUCP network, you reply to the author by using the From_ line, and you reply to the To: and Cc: recipients by prepending the author's path to the To: and Cc: addresses (you can reliably reduce symmetric paths). You can consider the mailx To: headers to be another kind of standard. It's not clean or pretty, but it does work. To fix it, UUCP mailers would have to rewrite all header lines AT EVERY HOP just like they rewrite From_ lines now. But they don't. Anyway, my system uses UUCP mail plus mailx with the above reply scheme. It works within our network pretty well. The problems start when I get mail from a system that rewrites headers. I can't tell, looking at the mail message, who rewrote it where. Please, when injecting mail into a network, conform to its standards. -- Michael Scott Baldwin research!mike attmail!mike mike@att.com AT&T Bell Laboratories +1 201 386 3052