sysnet@central1.lancaster.ac.uk (The Postmaster) (08/30/90)
We're currently experiencing some nasty problems with mail going out to EARN from sendmail 5.61. What's happening is that the relay is not translating our machine name in the From: field to little-endian, so the BITNET site sees the message as from fred@uk.ac.lancs.cent1. It then isn't able to reply to the mail. Now, our sendmail is set up to include the GECOS field in the From: line, so we send, say From: Fred Bloggs <fred@uk.ac.lancaster.central1> Phil Overy at the relay tells me that the problem is caused by the presence of dots in this field: thus the example above will work properly, but From: F.Bloggs <fred@uk.ac.lancaster.central1> is treated as illegal by the relay, and will get to the BITNET side _without_ the site name being reversed. We're using UK-Sendmail 2.1 to build the configuration file: so I would guess that this problem must affect a lot of people. Does anyone else see it, or is there some other factor making it peculiar to us? I know that at least one PRIME site has also observed this behaviour. Second, what do mail gurus think of the situation? Is the earn relay acting reasonably? Third, what do I do to get round this? We send a lot of mail into EARN, and it's causing our users quite a problem. Our $o and $q macros are defined thusly: Do.:%@!^=/[]~ Dq$?x$x <$g>$|$g$. Can anyone suggest what I can change them to? Would putting the GECOS field in quotes (how?) solve it? -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | LANCASTER UNIVERSITY POSTMASTER Alan Phillips | |----------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Computer Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YW, UK | | "A very long way from anywhere...." | | Phone: 0524-65201 x 3672 | |----------------------------------------------------------------------------| | JANET : postmaster@uk.ac.lancs.cent1 | | BITNET: postmaster%uk.ac.lancs.cent1@ukacrl | | UUCP : postmaster%uk.ac.lancs.cent1@ukc | | ARPA : postmaster%uk.ac.lancs.cent1@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk | +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
scott@castle.ed.ac.uk (Scott Larnach) (08/30/90)
| Phil Overy at the relay tells me that the problem is caused by the presence | of dots in this field: thus the example above will work properly, but | | From: F.Bloggs <fred@uk.ac.lancaster.central1> | | is treated as illegal by the relay, and will get to the BITNET side _without_ | the site name being reversed. On this machine (ed.castle) we run MMDF which will quote a "real name" field with dots (and other significant characters). But I still get reports from people on the other side of the bitnet gateway that they get our addresses coming through in JANET order, so clearly there are other conditions under which this will happen. Scott
Richard.Hopkins@bristol.ac.uk (09/28/90)
Apologies if you've already received a copy of this. I haven't, so assume that the list was temporarily screwed up. Forwarded message: | Date: Wed, 26 Sep 90 16:11:11 BST | To: uk-sendmail-workers@hw.cs | Subject: Problems with dots in From: fields | | Hi - we've also fallen victim to the "problem with dots in From: fields" | problem. Has anyone come up with a solution to the problem yet? If not, | does the change in the "Dq" definition suggested below (UK-sendmail 2.1) | do the necessaries without jeopardising aything else? | | Instead of the usual... | | Dq$?x$x <$g>$|$g$. | | How's about ... | | Dq$?x\"$x\" <$g>$|$g$. | | Richard Hopkins |