🚀 go-pugleaf

I think it's time I put in my take on this issue.

In the referenced article, chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
>Brian Kantor describes UCSD's setup. Two items deserve comment:
>
>>If the mail arriving via uucp contains a From: line like host@dom.ain,
>>rmail does not alter it at all before passing it to sendmail, and when it
>>leaves via uucp, we choose the greatest common denominator and issue it
>>as ucsd!dom.ain!host in the outgoing From: line, and as
>>"From dom.ain!host date remote from ucsd" in the uucp From line.
>
>This policy, however, is totally unjustifiable. As RFC822 gains even
>wider acceptance among the non-Internet community, more and more
>UUCP-only sites will be registered with the DNS. Why, oh why, must a
>site registered with the DNS and complying with RFC822 in every way
>suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous header rewriting, just
>because they happen to use UUCP as their mail transport?

Because they're not using SMTP to do the transport. The UUCP E-mail
protocols have different rules and requirements.

Because we're in the middle of a protocol conversion, when the vast
majority of sites still speak the old protocol (i.e. UUCP mail), and
software delivered from the vendors still assumes that standard, rather
than the Internet standards. Them's the facts of life. That's why I
have apple.com configured to do the same thing as Brian Kantor
describes. Like it or lump it.

Until UUCP has vanished from the face of the earth, or until we're all
using a "bsmtp" command to transfer mail over a UUCP transport instead
of "rmail", we all must speak the UUCP protocols in the original when
we speak UUCP. As it happens, there is latitude within the original
protocols to put domain names in a form that everyone in the UUCP
universe can use them (e.g. foo!dom.ain!user). Lucky us.

If you and a neighbor agree to do something different across a UUCP
connection, that's cool, but don't invoke it with the "rmail" command,
because doing that is changing the protocol. You're not supposed to do
that. It impedes interoperability. Definitely a "no no."

But what I'm really wondering is why Salzenberg and the people who
agree with him want all us kind, generous, charitable gateway/forwarder
sites to do all the work for him?

If you wanna be smart, take RFC976 to its logical conclusion, and
convert the dom.ain!user stuff back to user@dom.ain at your site, for
your mailers, and enjoy the fruits of that labor. You know your own
site names and what a domain name is, so this is allowed, and easy to
do. Small matter of software (or configuration, where sendmail is
concerned). I did exactly this sort of thing when I was last a
postmaster at a pure UUCP site, six years ago. So far as my local users
were concerned, it looked like Internet, smelled like Internet, and
worked like Internet. They were really happy, and I didn't burden my
Internet gateway site's postmaster with my internal E-mail
configuration problems.

You're wasting your breath (or your keyboard fingers, as the case may
be) trying to convince me to do it for you, and in so doing, break
E-mail to every old UUCP site that I speak to.

So the answer to the original question is: sendmail can and should mung
any and every header that it needs to, in order to get the job done
right without breaking everyone who is compliant with the appropriate
protocols for the network that they're on.

The fundamental problem is that there are perhaps 100 people who
understand this well enough to get it right, but tens of thousands of
sites where it has to be done right, with postmasters who think that
because they have read chapter 5 of the "Sendmail Installation and
Operation Guide", they are therefore qualified to hack sendmail config
files (and after they get it wrong, some of them even have the temerity
to argue with those of us who got it right years ago!).

You should see what I have to do to get E-mail in and out of AppleLink.
Sometimes the transformations are just not reversible, because the
destination E-mail system is too brain damaged, and it's so old and
entrenched that no one will change it enough to make it work right.
I expect that Delphi, CompuServe, MCImail, and GEnie will/do have
similar problems in this regard.

UUCP E-mail has the opposite problem - it's too simple, too close to
the Internet standard, and too malleable, so people believe it can be
hacked into being the Internet standard. Sorry folks, 'taint so. If
that's what you want, use BSMTP over UUCP instead.

	Happy New Year,

	Erik E. Fair	apple!fair	fair@apple.com
	Apple Postmaster

P.S.	Karl, finish the book!