🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Jun1.213148.21808@chinet.chi.il.us> les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:
> One thing that *is* a problem is trying to do a reply to all the
> recepients of the message from a dumb uucp site.  Mailx uses
> 'r', Elm uses 'g', Mush uses replyall, AT&T PMX-mailers use <F5>(Ans)
> <F2>(All) to try to interpret the To: and Cc: lines,
BTW, Mush is the only one of these (as far as I know) that is
configurable.  That's how mush has been so successful at emulating
other user agents.  But that's just the user interface aspect; the
functionality of what happens behind the scenes is another issue.

> and they all produce fairly bizzare results.
At least in mush, these results are configurable.  That is,
you can tell mush to construct a return path to mail in various
ways depending on details about your site.  For example, you can
tell it to truncate all addresses to be simple user/host.dom.ain
syntax, or, to route all domain based mail thru a particular host...
Or, recipient addresses can be routed thru the original author's host,
via a "better path" if you know it (and care to provide it), etc...
Where to get this information can be obtained from any set of Headers
that you choose as well.  The options are lengthy, but this flexibility
allows for just about every site and configuration to be able to
use and reply to mail with as little header editing by the user.
Great for sysadmins who hate having to answer user questions..

> The most likely thing to work
> (short of tossing the uucp path concept entirely), is to reverse
> the From_ path and stick it in front of the other addresses, then
> collapse any obvious duplications ( A!A A!B!A).  Unfortunately, this
> doesn't work well if user@host or domain!user notation is used.

Mush's algorithms for constructing reply addresses consists of
many heuristics including some of those you mention here.  It gets
around the syntax differences (e.g., ! vs @) by converting all
addresses to ! format first for consistency and then returning
them (if necessary/desired/possible) to the original format the
address was found in.  (Note: this is not always possible and
is highly dependent on the options you've chosen.)

Not forgetting the original comment/question that brought up this
whole issue -- yes, uunet does munge headers incorrectly (From:
Return-Path:, Reply-To:, etc (by my observation)), but so far,
Mush has always been able to reconstruct return addresses pretty
well (tho, not always :-).  The Mush man page goes into detail
about the options available, how to set them, and what it does to
addresses in each case.

--
dan
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O'Reilly && Associates   argv@sun.com / argv@ora.com
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