UCB Mail tries to be too smart

[Mark Sirota]

In article <885 at ur-cc.UUCP> I write:
> I just found a misfeature with UCB Mail.  If remote mail comes in (i.e.
> mail from a remote site, with a From: line of the form
> 	remote-user at remote-host
> and your sendmail.cf strips the hostname off of local addresses, so that
> the To: reads just
> 	local-user
> instead of
> 	local-user at local-host
> and the local user does a replyall in UCB Mail, then the resulting To:
> line will be
> 	local-user at remote-host remote-user at remote-host
> 
> I find this unacceptable.  It would seem that UCB mail is trying to be
> intelligent; that is, it's assuming that remote-host may have been dumb
> and not fully qualified it's addresses, so it tries to recreate it for you.
> 
> Well, I don't want it to do that.  I deliberately strip the local machine
> name off of all addresses before local delivery, so the headers will never
> contain the local host name.

Well, I've gotten quite a large number of responses to this.
Unfortunately, there seems to be no consensus.  About half the people
agree with me that UCB Mail is brain-damaged, and the other half think I'm
brain-damaged for stripping local hostnames in the first place.

Given that, I'm willing to give up the campaign to change UCB Mail
(although I still think it's brain-damaged).

Only one person was able to give me a persuasive reason not to strip local
hostnames (hope you don't mind, Craig):

In message <IY0LJDy00VsL86fHFj at andrew.cmu.edu> "Craig F. Everhart" <cfe+ at andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
| What you're doing seems reasonable at first, but there are oddball cases
| that I wonder if you're handling correctly.  I can think of re-sending and
| forwarding (packaging onemessage inside the body of another) as example
| user actions that often aren't handled in a correct manner when local host
| names are stripped (or abbreviated),and I imagine that there are others.
| Just to be clear, the problems I cite occur when a piece of mail is sent
| locally, then that received piece of mail is re-sent or forwarded
| elsewhere; the addresses in the headers aren't usually updated correctly.
| What happens when some external recipient of such mail tries to use the
| addresses in the headers of that mail?

So, my inclination is to put the local hostname on *all* local addresses,
even those that are completely local.  For instance, if I mail joeuser on
my-machine, the From: header will be "From: msir at my-machine", and the To:
header will be "To: joeuser at my-machine".

| These complications, and others I'm sure, are why RFC822 says that
| exchanged mail needs to have fully-qualified host names.  While I imagine
| that you could fix up all these and other problems, most Internet sites
| use RFC822 as their internal mail representation also, so that the act of
| mail crossing between inside and outside isn't as complicated as relaying
| mail between dissimilar maildomains.

I ask the net: Is this true?  Do "most Internet sites use RFC822 as their
*internal* mail representation also"?

Thanks for any and all opinions.

Mark
-- 
Mark Sirota - University of Rochester, Rochester, NY
 Internet: msir at cc.rochester.edu
 Bitnet:   msir_ss at uordbv.bitnet
 UUCP:     ...!rochester!ur-cc!msir