[bit.listserv.pmdf-l] A couple of questions...

ROGER@NUACC (Roger Safian, VAX Systems Group) (02/14/90)

Greetings,

    Does anyone have a way to prevent VMS 5.0+ systems from upcaseing
a forwarding username?  It seems that starting with 5.0, VMS now upcases
a username, when it writes it to the mail profile file.  This causes
problems, if you want to forward your mail to a Unix system.  Pre 5.0
addresses are not changed, unless you modify them.  If you want to see
how this works, try this from within mail:

                SET FORWARD "in%""user@unix.node"""

Now if you SHOW FORWARD, it will look fine, but when you exit and
reenter mail, if you SHOW FORWARD again, you will see that the address
has been converted.  I have talked to DEC about this, and they don't
seem to think that it's a problem!  I did get a patched version of
MAILSHARE, but I am reluctant to use it, because a) PMDF may not like
it, and b) DEC is not going to support it.


    I seem to be getting a few messages each day, that are rejected
by PMDF, with the error message "Message rejected; bad return address.".
Does anyone else see these?  They strike me as a little strange, because
they don't have any info from another system.  Also, the messages all
occure at the same time.  I suspect that PMDF gets "stuck", and that
all the messages during this period are rejected.  I have seen this
period range from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours.  I have
turned on debug, but none of the logs for the period in question seem
to show a problem.


    Just for your information, there is a bug in CONVERT/SORT.  This
can be pretty ugly if it hits a user who is compressing his mail.
DEC has a patch, and so far it seems to work.  The bug is in VMS 5.2,
and 5.3.  If you need a copy, I suggest you call DEC ASAP, and have them
send you the patched versions of the files.  Thanks for your assisstance.

                                             Roger