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Re: [RFC] Exim as standard Debian MTA?



Steve Lamb <morpheus@calweb.com> wrote:
>     Read the bat book.

I have, though not recently.

> While I dislike the Sendmail configuration file they give good
> examples on why rewriting is in there. The short and sweet answer is
> simple, which one of these are valid:
>
> From: Steve Lamb <morpheus@calweb.com>
> From: morpheus@calweb.com
> From: morpheus@calweb.com (Steve Lamb)
> From: "Steve Lamb" <<morpheus@calweb.com>>
> From: Steve Lamb <morpheus%calweb@teleute.dyn.ml.org>
> 
>     Answer, according to sendmail and the abigiuties of the RFCs, all of
> them.

First off, sendmail shouldn't care (except that it's both an SMTP
mailer and a user agent for taking messages and turning them into SMTP).
And it doesn't need to look at the From: header for that.

Secondly, I see nothing in RFC822 (nor any later RFC) which indicates
that <<morpheus@calweb.com>> is a valid email address.

Third, <morpheus%calweb@teleute.dyn.ml.org> is very different from those
other email addresses.  In general, it's a bug to treat it the same.

Finally, all that's left is one email address: morpheus@calweb.com

Ok, now let's say that this is a To: header and that sendmail needed to
take a look at it.  The most sensible mechanism, here, would be something
that took a list of addresses in RFC 822 format, tossed the irrelevant
stuff, and returned the resultant list.

As it happens, it would be nice to have such a tool runnable at the
shell level, but that's for another thread.

Anyways, you don't need a language which treats "." as a delimiter to
perform this function.  Nor do you need a lot of the rest of sendmail's
features.  Furthermore, when dealing with mailing lists, most of these
features are bugs.  [When you rewrite a mail address you may be preventing
someone from unsubscribing from the mailing list.]

-- 
Raul


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