curtisg@sco.com (Curtis Galloway) (01/17/91)
I have to deal with non-RFC822-conforming mailers which generate address lists separated by whitespace rather than commas. AMS always treats these address lists as one big name and converts the spaces to dots. I noticed that there was some code in overhead/mail/lib/parseadd.c to explicitly deal with this case, but only if there is a parse error first. Why doesn't a list of whitespace-separated words cause a parse error? I'm running the R4 software with patchlevel 8. --Curt Galloway curtisg@sco.com
Craig_Everhart@TRANSARC.COM (01/18/91)
The code that turns whitespace into commas was only a historical hack at CMU to parse the typical contents of a ~/.forward file (originally for sendmail's use). Unfortunately, people began to depend on its behavior for use in AMDS distribution lists. I'd rather rip out that special-case hack, myself. It causes lots of confusion for folks such as yourself and for folks who use a comma after some addresses (in a dist list) but not all. There's nothing syntactically wrong with an RFC 822 address built of spaces and words, as long as there are no ``special'' characters in the string like ``@:;,<>''. Craig