🚀 go-pugleaf

fitz@wang.com writes:
   Well, I get sh*tloads of failure cases here.

What I meant by a "failure case" was "a case where the transform
_in_and_of_itself_ doesn't work."  It _does_ work:  I _can_ exchange
back and forth between the two forms without error.  And given that
the transform is !-path-centric, and that the most common intelligent
UUCP router is smail 2.5, and that smail 2.5 knows how to deal with
proper.domain.name!anything, then it can be considered to work in
general.

   Well, you've contradicted yourself since you've just changed an
   RFC822-compliant header into a noncompliant one.

No.  By the time I'm routing out via UUCP, RFC822 no longer applies.
I've argued this more times than I can count, in such areas as my
choice to be a Domain Absolutist Rabid Rerouter.  I've transformed the
header into something that a(n assumed) dumb[*] UUCP neighbor can cope
with, but in a form that is readily transformable back into an RFC
header if the receiving site wants it that way.  From what my UUCP
neighbors tell me, they do, and they know how.

   > Incoming Address	Departing via	Rewrite
   > -------- -------	--------- ---	-------
   > owhn!user		local or UUCP	don't touch it

   Interesting.   You don't even change it to osu-cis!owhn!user?

No.  That would be redundant.  This _is_ osu-cis.

   > owhn!user@f.q.d.n	local or SMTP	don't touch it
   > 			UUCP		"From:" -- f.q.d.n!owhn!user

   In some ways this is the worst of several worlds.  Dumb UUCP sites (even if
   they do use From:) can't use it because it begins with something that isn't
   a neighboring UUCP site.  And smart sites, seeing that it isn't RFC822,
   will try to "fix" it.

Truly dumb sites will use the From_ address, which has "osu-cis!"
prepended.  Smart sites (even only to the level of intelligence of
smail 2.5, and certainly with sendmail) can deal with the From:
adequately.

It works.  I constitute my own existence proof of that fact.  My main
mail-routing host here shoveled 12Gbytes of mail in the month of May.
I haven't heard even one complaint about routing errors or abuse.

--karl

[*] "Dumb UUCP site" == /bin/{r,}mail and /usr/bin/uux only.  Anything
    beyond that (e.g., smail) constitutes a smart site.