🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <KARL.90Dec6171155@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu> karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu writes:
>bruce@balilly.uucp writes:
>   >	To: user@toaster		To: toaster!user@gatebox
>   >	From: me@tinytoy		From: tinytoy!me@gatebox
>
>        When a message crosses a domain boundary, all  addresses  must
>        be  specified  in  the  full format, ending with the top-level
>        name-domain in the right-most field.  It is the responsibility
>        of  mail  forwarding services to ensure that addresses conform
>        with this requirement.  In the case of abbreviated  addresses,
>        the  relaying  service must make the necessary expansions...

>The "gatebox" in question is doing exactly the right thing if it is
>making addresses palatable to things outside your domain.  If it's
>doing it for destinations within your domain, it's harmless but not
>especially useful.

There's no evidence from those addresses that the internet was involved
at all or that internet rules have any bearing on the matter.  If it
were harmless, the question wouldn't have been brought up.

>If your site inflicts "user@tinytoy" on my sendmail, I'm going to
>finish the job of address-breaking that your site started: It's going
>to be rewritten as user@cis.ohio-state.edu.  This rewrite does the
>Right Thing in the usual case where Joe Random writes mail to, e.g.,
>jane@apple.  I have to interpret OneWordHostNames within the context
>of cis.ohio-state.edu, a host apple.cis.ohio-state.edu exists, and we
>hide hostnames anyway, so I rewrite all OWHNs as cis.ohio-state.edu.

The uunet practice of munging to OWHN%user@mydomain is probably the
best approach to a bad situation.  At least if you are willing to
resolve OWHN's to the extent that they do (or throw it at Rutgers  
if you aren't).   With this approach, if a site misinterprets the
munging it will at least get an error locally instead of sending
down something that appears to be a path as happens with the
OWHN!user@mydomain approach.

Actually, I contend that rewriting as user@OWHN.NET.mydomain would
be a kinder thing to do if you have the wild-card MX to bring
back the replies, and the NET name could be a variable telling you
where to look for the OWHN to avoid conflicts.

>Since a recipient here of address "user@tinytoy" couldn't have replied
>directly to it anyway, I figure it serves 'em right if they have to
>hunt through Received: headers for the real information they needed.

But the recipient may not be at your site.  If you claim uucp connectivity
to tinytoy and toaster, then you should d*mn well be able to deliver
from one to the other without destroying the header information.

>I post an explanatory "mail/news/finger glitches and solutions" to a
>local newsgroup periodically so that the users know what's what.

Perhaps you should include such a message in error bounces when the
destination was user@cis.ohio-state.  Something like:
"We regret that this message cannot be delivered - if this was a
reply to a message from some other machine, we don't believe that
machine ever existed."

Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us