🚀 go-pugleaf

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

karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu writes:
> 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.

This is true in the sense that mail has to get at least 2 hops away from
you before it's broken beyond recovery; but your rewriting has made that
breakage possible, and it wouldn't happen if you didn't rewrite it.  Things
may look great to you because you don't see the errors; but I do.  I get
mail with incredible collections of !s, @s and %s and when I reply, the
replies bounce.  Here's one I just saw:

	From: somebody%utdssa.dnet%utadnx@utspan.span.nasa.gov

If it were run through your rewriting rules (as I understand them) you'd
turn it into:

	From: utspan.span.nasa.gov!somebody%utdssa.dnet%utadnx

which would no longer be usable because ! binds tighter than %.  If
you changed the %s to !s, it would still be unusable because when a reply
came to your machine you'd try to DARR it to "utdssa.dnet" and wouldn't
be able to make contact with it (or do you only DARR to domains beneath
known root subdomains?).

You're also right in the sense that, if everyone rewrote and routed mail
the same way you do, there would be no problems.  But everyone has their
own idea of how mail should be rewritten - !s get turned into %'s, @my.node
gets tacked onto the end, etc.  RELAY.CS.NET, the previous incarnation of
decwrl and some BITNET gateways have philosophies that don't mix well
with @->! rewriting.  In the aggregate, addresses get trashed.

> 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.

smail can also understand "anything@proper.domain.name", so there's nothing
about !-addresses that makes them better.  And speaking as a smail user, I'd
much rather see an @-address than a !-address because it's more robust.
The thing about !-addresses is that people keep rewriting them over and over.

> No.  By the time I'm routing out via UUCP, RFC822 no longer applies.

Your original comment in <KARL.90May30213527@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu> was:

>>> My sendmail.cf is perfectly happy to leave RFC822-compliant headers
>>> alone.

RFC822 does only claim relevance to SMTP; but it defines a header format
that is pretty much independent of transport.  Even in the UUCP world,
the closer something is to RFC822 the better things work.

> I've transformed the
> header into something that a(n assumed) dumb[*] UUCP neighbor can cope
> with

But dumb UUCP neighbors don't pay attention to From: lines, so why change
them in a way that hurts the smart sites several hops away?

> It works.  I constitute my own existence proof of that fact.

Meaning that you don't see any problems.  I do.

> 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.

I can't complain about OSU, because little mail from here goes through
you.  But as a philosophy, I hereby complain: sites that rewrite valid
addresses cause more mail to be lost than sites that don't rewrite, and
I have seen this happen often.  So your set of complaints is now non-null.
Anyone else want to add to it?

Honestly, us UUCP people are fairly shy about complaining to our Internet
neighbors because we depend on them(you) for so much.  Given the choice
between complaining and just trying to quietly compensate, I'll keep quiet.
But this is something that genuinely causes mail to be lost, and there's
nothing I can do to fix it.  I've just recently started complaining to the
sites around here that do rewriting.  You may have more silently suffering
neighbors than you think; or more likely, sites that put "dead {osu-cis}"
in the local additions to their maps without ever bothering to tell you
about it.

---
Tom Fitzgerald      Wang Labs           fitz@wang.com
1-508-967-5278      Lowell MA, USA      ...!uunet!wang!fitz