🚀 go-pugleaf

We're currently experiencing some nasty problems with mail going out to EARN
from sendmail 5.61. What's happening is that the relay is not translating
our machine name in the From: field to little-endian, so the BITNET site
sees the message as from fred@uk.ac.lancs.cent1. It then isn't able to
reply to the mail.

Now, our sendmail is set up to include the GECOS field in the From: line,
so we send, say

   From: Fred Bloggs <fred@uk.ac.lancaster.central1>

Phil Overy at the relay tells me that the problem is caused by the presence
of dots in this field: thus the example above will work properly, but

   From: F.Bloggs <fred@uk.ac.lancaster.central1>

is treated as illegal by the relay, and will get to the BITNET side _without_
the site name being reversed.

We're using UK-Sendmail 2.1 to build the configuration file: so I would
guess that this problem must affect a lot of people. Does anyone else see it,
or is there some other factor making it peculiar to us? I know that at least
one PRIME site has also observed this behaviour.

Second, what do mail gurus think of the situation? Is the earn relay acting
reasonably?

Third, what do I do to get round this? We send a lot of mail into EARN, and
it's causing our users quite a problem. Our $o and $q macros are defined thusly:

Do.:%@!^=/[]~
Dq$?x$x <$g>$|$g$.

Can anyone suggest what I can change them to? Would putting the GECOS field in
quotes (how?) solve it?

-- 

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| LANCASTER UNIVERSITY POSTMASTER                              Alan Phillips |
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| Computer Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YW, UK               |
| "A very long way from anywhere...."                                        |
| Phone: 0524-65201 x 3672                                                   |
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| JANET : postmaster@uk.ac.lancs.cent1                                       |
| BITNET: postmaster%uk.ac.lancs.cent1@ukacrl                                |
| UUCP  : postmaster%uk.ac.lancs.cent1@ukc                                   |
| ARPA  : postmaster%uk.ac.lancs.cent1@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk                    |
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