🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Dec14.064837.8996@Latour.Sandelman.OCUnix.On.Ca> fts1!latour!mcr@alfred.ccs.carleton.ca writes:
>  But, I/chip/tct-admin PUT chip@tct.UUCP in the From:
>  If I can't get a reply, THAT IS MY PROBLEM!!!!!

While it may be your bug, it is the other person's problem.  He wants to
send you a reply, and has to hunt down a mail guru to figure out how to
address it.  He can't even contact you to ask what the correct address is,
unless he knows how to reach you by some medium other than email.

Here's a situation that you haven't addressed: what if the message is going
to multiple recipients, using different mail protocols having different
address conventions.  For instance,

	To: foo!bar!baz!user1, user2@quux.dom.ain

Further, assume the baz system is on the UUCP network, so only understands
UUCP bang-paths, while quux.dom.ain is on the Internet and only understands
RFC-822 addresses.  The same "From" field can't be used when forwarding the
message to both addresses, because one of them won't be able to reply to
it.  Furthermore, one of the To addresses needs to be munged, because most
user agents provide the option of including all the original recipients as
secondary recipients of the reply.

Sendmail is an application-level protocol-translating gateway.  There
wouldn't be much controversy over an SMTP<->X.400 gateway munging headers;
it's an obvious part of the job.  Why do you expect less of a UUCP<->SMTP
gateway?  The header requirements and interpretation mechanisms of the two
protocols are not identical, and it is the job of a gateway to transform a
message coming in via one protocol into a valid message for the other
protocol.
--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar