Subject: Multiple @ in Address

From: [email-masked] (Robert Creighton)
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 1995 14:58:41 GMT

Our internal mail system requires some addresses to be "chained" through 
others, such as user@machine1@machine2.

Pine 3.91 does not like this format, and produces "junk at end of 
address: @machine2"

Can this be fixed? I don't have the problem with DEC's TeamLinks or Sun's 
Mailtool.

--
Regards

R.W. Creighton
Halifax NS
CANADA

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 25 Apr 1995 13:28:22 -0700

The multiple-@ syntax of RFC-733 has been banned on the Internet since the
early 1980s.  I should know, since it was my mailer's first widespread use
of this syntax on the net triggered the ban!  Something about a certain
MUA from a well-known government contractor, used by high-level military
and government brass, crashing when it saw those things and smashing the
mailbox file with it... 

RFC-822 formalized the ban in 1982, more than 7 years before Pine was
written.  RFC-822 offers a mechanism of source routing via this syntax:
	<@machine2:user@machine1>
but this syntax has been depreciated in favor of moving routing to the 
domain name system via MX records.

The only practical means of doing source routing these days is a
convention known as the "%-hack" [which I popularized in the wake of the
above-mentioned ban, causing a different crisis...but that's another
story!].

The %-hack works by treating the rightmost-% in a local mailbox as an @. 
On the originating end, all by the rightmost-@ is changed to an %.  In
other words, you would use the syntax:
	user%machine1@machine2
This is interpreted by the sender as mailbox "user%machine1" at 
"machine2", by machine2 as mailbox "user" at "machine1", and finally by 
machine1 as local mailbox "user".

I don't believe that there is any scenario that Pine would be changed to
support a syntax that has been rejected as a great evil for 15 years. 

I hope that the %-hack will solve your problem satisfactorily; if not,
could you explain a bit more about your configuration?  There should be 
some other way to address this problem.

-- Mark --

DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot, FAX: (206) 685-4045  ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39"
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.