Subject: Using "!" addressing with Pine

From: [email-masked] (Mike Scheuerman)
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1993 08:45:06 -0800 (PST)

I suspect that some of the problems we're having getting things set up the
way we want are interrelated, but another problem has cropped up.  We're
trying to set up a uucp connection to a couple of other machines and
everytime we put in an address (e.g. AST!Mikes) on the remote machine, Pine
appends the local machine address to it (e.g. AST!Mikes@CMSICOR1) and things
get lost.  We've not had problems with elm or plain old mail.  Any ideas on
what we're doing wrong?

Thanks again.

Mike Scheuerman

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1993 10:51:53 -0800 (PST)

Mike -

     Pine does not have any specific support for UUCP style addressing, or for
that matter any style other than Internet domain format addresses.  This is
(at least partially) my fault when I built the address management support in
c-client, so you know where the hate mail and letter bombs should go.  :-)

     The notion was that UUCP style addressing was obsolete and that new email
links, even those using UUCP transports, would use domain format addresses.
Large parts of the UUCP world had made this transition, which led me into the
false belief that the rest would soon follow.  In the succeeding years, I've
learned that folly of that thinking...  :-)

     There are important technical reasons why domain format addressing is
superior to UUCP addressing, not the least being the syntax ambiguities which
arise; note the endless infared (lots of heat, little light) debates about the
priority order of ! % and @ that appear on the newsgroups from time to time.
It's a desirable goal to abolish UUCP addressing, but perhaps still a bit
premature.

     I have heard, but cannot verify, that a small change to your system's
sendmail.cf file is all that is needed to support UUCP-bound mail with Pine.
I have seen reports from other sites that say they have used such a workaround
with good results.  If someone can report the necessary magic, it should get
recorded for the next time the question comes up.

     We'll have to take a look at this issue and see if we can offer a better
solution.  I shudder at the thought of having to support UUCP (or DECnet)
addressing, but it may end up being necessary.  :-(

Regards,

-- Mark --

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From: Dan Schlitt <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 1993 17:20:08 -0500 (EST)

Mark,

To come to your defense on bang paths.  Mail routing is a MTA problem and
not a user agent problem.  I really don't want my users trying to tell me
how to route mail.  When it comes to bang-paths they probably have it
wrong anyhow.  They route through seismo or ihnp4 :-).

Since all of the mail going out of here, whether the MUA is pine, Berkeley
mail, MUSH,... goes through sendmail I have sendmail take care of the routing.
I use two pseudo-domains to tell the MTA to send mail to UUCP or BITNET.
So users use addresses like [email-masked] or [email-masked]
and sendmail does the rest.  I have used smail with good effect to route
the uucp.  The required databases were made automatically from the maps
that were snarfed from the newsgroup.

/dan

Dan Schlitt                           School of Engineering Computer Systems
[email-masked]        City College of New York
(212)650-6760                         New York, NY 10031