🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Apr8.164249.10851@husc3.harvard.edu> utterbac@husc10.harvard.edu (Margot Utterback) writes:
>Recently, I contacted a workstation vendor about the mail system
>that comes with the workstation.  The operating system is based
>on System V release 4.  The mail system failed when the host portion
>of an address was an alias or nickname.  The response was that 
>RFC821 and RFC822 specify that the address must be the official
>domain name and that the entries in the host file and any 
>cname records in the DNS are irrelevent.

>This seems a little farfetched to me.  First, the rfcs in theis
>case seem to be irrelevent.  Don't they only specify what would
>be in the headers, not the address given to the mailer?  
 
YES! The RFCs have NOTHING to do with the user interface!

I think everyone is missing the point here. RFC-1123 requires the envelope name
(RCPT line) to include the fully qualified domain name. This has NOTHING to do
with what the mailer accepts from the user. Any reasonable mailer should make a
reasonable attempt to use aliases and local names by converting them into
FQDNs. I've never seen one which wouldn't, although I know of one System V
Release 4 vendor whose sendmail is so messed up that it really cannot be said
to work at all. Wonder if it's the same one? I won't speak their name, but they
just bought the company that makes most of their CPU chips.

The key issue here is the user interface to mail. While I personally prefer to
see FQDN used all of the time, most users never send mail outside of our local
domain and don't realise the significance of the llnl.gov on the end. They just
send to user@node and are done with it. sendmail then converts user@node to
user@FQDN and uses this address.

>Second,
>why limit the address even in the header? You get the host portion,
>ask the DNS what the MX record is.  It will respond with the
>IP address and the canonical name.  Bingo, you have the official
>name, just use that in the rest of the processing.  

Huh? If you send mail to me with an entry of user@node in the header, unless
there is some other information, I have no way to know where a given node is.
Not everyone is at Harvard. Some folk are at MIT and a few are not even east of
the rockies! Specifically, the "From:", "Sender:", "Reply to:" and any other
header used to derive the reply address MUST use the FQDN. No substitutes are
permitted. Some mail agents do allow the name, as entered by the user, to be
included in a special header line, but never in any of the RFC-822 mandated
header lines.

R. Kevin Oberman			Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Internet: oberman1@llnl.gov		(510) 422-6955

Disclaimer: Don't take this too seriously. I just like to improve my typing
and probably don't really know anything useful about anything.