UCB Mail tries to be too smart

[Mark Sirota]

In article <885 at ur-cc.UUCP> msir at cc.rochester.edu (Mark Sirota) writes:
> 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.  And now I find that UCB Mail is trying to
> protect me from myself.
> 
> That pisses me off.

I've just been looking through the code for Mail.  The offending procedure
appears to be netmap() in optim.c, which is called from mapf() in names.c,
which is called from _respond() in cmd3.c.

In my opinion, the world would be a better place if this sequence of
functions were never called.  Does anyone see a good reason not to do it?

The problem, as I see it, is that these functions are insuring that the
use doesn't get trapped by a stupid sendmail.cf elsewhere in the world
which didn't fully qualify all its outgoing addresses.  Now, I'm perfectly
willing to believe that there are plenty of such sendmail.cf's out there.
Mine, personally, isn't one of them.  I don't want my software trying to
protect me from myself, and I see this as basically against one of UNIX's
philosophical foundations.  As I said before, it pisses me off.  Not to
mention that I can't do what I consider the Right Thing in my sendmail.cf
without having UCB Mail break on me.

So will anything break if I go and change it?
Anyone wanna help me lobby to have it changed for good?

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