Subject: Re: Problems with Unix accounts?

From: kremžská HOŘČICE <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 1996 07:10:20 +0200

On Tue, 23 Apr 1996, Mark Crispin wrote:

> On 22 Apr 1996, John Stewart wrote:
> > 
> > Pine insists on adding a domain to addresses in the To: or Cc: header lines.
> > The designers of Pine do not seem to understand that this is not a task
> > that should be performed by a Mail User Agent.
> 
> Your rant and rave has been heard.
> 
> We disagree.

    I agree with the Pine authors.  In a real-world case, I've had more
experience with e-mail domains not being added by the MTA properly than I
have had problems with Pine writing them.  And I've had problems which
perhaps advocates of domainless addresses never anticipated from which a
program could not gracefully recover, that I have had to catch and fix by
hand on a regular basis.

    I will agree that it is nice to be able to rewrite such addresses as
<[email-masked]> which does not get mail to <[email-masked]> which
can, but I would rather see sendmail patched to handle this than for Pine
to write unqualified addresses.

    Compare the number of addresses Pine botches by qualifying them, to
the number of unqualified, and thereby unreplyable, addresses one finds in
a typical Usenet news group because nobody bothered to get the
configuration of the news software right.  Every day should show you
thousands of examples of the latter, or else you're not reading enough
news.

Barry Bouwsma  <barryb@ccsun>
Radio Praha Nuisance, Troublemaker, and General Pest