🚀 go-pugleaf

(Background -- purdue-merlin is acting as a mail relay on behalf of
decwrl until their X.25/IP connection is fully straightened out.)

I recently saw a message in my outbound mail queue with a recipient of
<@Purdue-Merlin.ARPA:hobday@algol.dec-marlboro.ARPA>. This looked
rather bogus, so I thought I'd dig into it a bit farther. I looked at
the header file (not the data, of course), and found that the message
had the following lines:

From: Ken Cowan <cowan@udel-relay>
To: Ken Hobday ZKO2-3/K23 881-2214 <hobday%algol.DEC@purdue-merlin.arpa>

Hmm. How did that get turned into the recipient above? Decwrl is acting
as a mail relay for the DEC Engineering network, and uses the .DEC
domain internally to indicate this. (Several internet sites currently
understand that the .DEC domain is handled by decwrl, by the way.)
However, "dec" is also a nickname for "dec-marlboro" in the NIC host
table. So it looks like udel-relay, which runs MMDF, is peeking at the
left hand side of headers not destined for itself and munging them (for
shame!). I know that it used to use the . specifier as an indicator
that this should be relayed (this from the old phonenet software), and
MMDF has this wonderful habit of expanding nicknames (and capitalizing
host names!) in headers that it munges....

So that's what I think happened. Udel-relay peeked at the header and
munged it as if it were relaying the note, but it doesn't really end up
being relayed after all. The letter didn't make it through. 

Would the postmaster at Udel-Relay please fix this bogosity? Would
other folks running the same mail software (you presumably know who you
are) check to make sure that you're not doing the same thing? 

Cheers,
chris
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