diamant@hpfclp.HP.COM (John Diamant) (02/14/88)
> I posted this request once earlier, but I got no response. C'mon, pleeeaaase. > I would help you, really I would. If I'm asking the wrong group, let me > know. This is as good a group as any, I guess (since the question isn't specific to one type of mail addressing, like UUCP). > I think the problem is in "turning the paths around". I have noticed > a high correlation between failure and the occurance of the symbol "@" in > the pathname. (That means it's an ARPA address, right?) Right, sort of. There are now domain addresses in use for machines that only have UUCP connections, but it is an ARPA-style address in any case. > Sometimes I > try to respond using a pathname with no @ in it, but when I get the > virtually inevitable MAILER-DAEMON answer, somehow an ampersand has > insinuated itself into the path. I have no idea where the ampersands are coming from. I've never seen that before. Someone's mailer is probably screwed up. You might want to pay attention to the path that the mail has been taking to see what machines are in common when the ampersand is generated. That way you could isolate which machines might have generated it. The Path: header should contain the path that the article took. It is not guaranteed to be a valid mail path, but many times it will work (you should generally trim the path, though, because they are usually very round-about). The From: line generally will contain a domain address (one with an "@" and names with dots on the right). If the domain ends in .UUCP, it isn't a real domain. For an address like that, the only hope is to give it to a pathalias system, which may be able to find a path to the machine. If it has a "real" domain (one ending in .com, .gov, .edu, .net, .org, or a country code), then it can be sent to an Internet machine (if you have one near you) or a machine with pathalias, again. You could run pathalias and smail on your local machine or set up your mailer to forward to another machine that runs pathalias (or is on the Internet). > ucbvax!sun!megatest!djones You seem to be connected to sun, which is pretty smart about domains. Maybe you should set your system up to forward mail it can't handle to sun. smail will do that for as will sendmail (sendmail comes with Berkeley Unix and its derivatives, as well as some other Unix systems). If you aren't the mail adminstrator on your machine, talk to him/her about it. John Diamant SDE UUCP: {hplabs,hpfcla}!hpfclp!diamant Hewlett-Packard Co. ARPA Internet: diamant%hpfclp@hplabs.HP.COM Fort Collins, CO