Subject: Re: Domain names (fwd)

From: Laurence Lundblade <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1992 11:50:12 -0700 (PDT)

A while ago I indicated that it would be nice if you could set the mail
domain the c-client uses for parsing unqaulified addresses. Here's some
other folks that would like to see it happen. I suppose we could be
pedegogical and say no to encourage people to fully qualify addresses, but 
sendmail configuration is difficult and I don't know if this is a battle
worth fighting. 

I think this would also make Pine a little more self consistent.

LL

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1992 17:13:40 +0100 (BST)
From: Laurie Cuthbert <[email-masked]>
To: Philip Hazel <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Domain names

Yes - it does do this and at first we thought, like you, that it would be
a major problem.

However, we have decided that pine is so worth using that we changed the
sendmail configuration to add the local domain name to all mail,
irrespective of the MUA being used. Presumably you are using the UK
sendmail configuration version 2.1 - if so there is a parameter that turns
on or off the local channel domain stamping.

In fact it proved to have an added benefit for us becuase we use
departmental domains internally, but only the site domain for
external messages, with PP massaging the name fields. By ensuring that the
domain name is ALWAYS stamped PP will correctly massage all fields,
including local CC fields.

Regards

Laurie Cuthbert

On Wed, 23 Sep 1992, Philip Hazel wrote:

> I've had to back off using Pine for the moment, because of the problem 
> described below.  Luckily, I was just experimenting with it. Any ideas as 
> to how to get round it, apart from hacking the code?
> 
> I have
> 
> # Domain name you are in  e.g. nwnet.net, cac.washington.edu, bwc.org
> user-domain=cus.cam.ac.uk
> 
> # Eliminate host part from hostname, using only domain part for domain name
> use-only-domain-name=yes
> 
> and for all the mail I send out, this works fine. Unqualified names end up 
> as "[email-masked]", which is what is wanted. There are several 
> machines in the cus.cam.ac.uk domain, but they form a common mail system. 
> The problem arises when I receive mail from another local user whose mail 
> user agent does *not* fully qualify names. So I have something like
> 
> From: someuser
> 
> in my inbox. Pine displays this as
> 
> From: [email-masked]
> 
> when I am running it on the machine bootes.cus.cam.ac.uk, or with a 
> different name if I run it on another machine. This is disastrous, 
> especially if I want to reply. [It is more disastrous for a machine in the 
> UK than for other Internet machines, because of the dual mail registration 
> with the JANET network. Only the shorter name is registered with JANET.]
> It looks as if Pine (version 3.05, running on a Sun) is ignoring the 
> use-only-domain-name parameter when displaying unqualified names in 
> incoming mail.
> 
> Philip Hazel 
> 
> -- 
> Internet: [email-masked]       University Computing Service,
> JANET:    [email-masked]       Computer Laboratory, Pembroke St,
> Phone:    +44 223 334714              Cambridge CB2 3QG, England.

---

From: "David Herron" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 92 13:20:27 PDT

Always stamping fully qualified domain names on mail addresses
is a Very Good Practice.  One of the major misfeatures that Sendmail
has foisted upon the world is the practice of not doing so.

Places where I've seen problems:

- If the nameservers are currently dead & you've got a partially
  qualified name it might do the wrong thing (or at least take a long
  time to do nothing because it's waiting for nameserver timeouts).
  NOTE: It's been a couple of years since this was seen and I don't
  remember details.

- If someone forwards a piece of mail sent by a local user, it doesn't
  have qualified addresses.  If it's forwarded to a non-local user the
  local MTA is unable to rewrite the addresses & the recipient gets
  mail with an embedded message containing addresses which looks to
  be local to that user.  If the user then tries to use that embedded
  message to create a reply, the addresses are way-wrong & confusion
  can easily result.

- Some digest creators do not qualify addresses in the embedded headers.
  This is the same as the previous problem, and is the common case where
  it happens.  Some UA's provide a command for automagically bursting
  a digest and turning it into `n' new messages in the users mailbox.  
  The user may wish to reply and/or forward to any of those messages
  but they've got screwed up addresses ...

<- David Herron <[email-masked]> (work) <[email-masked]> (home)
<-
<- During the '80s Usenet's mantra was: "Not all the world's a VAX".
<- During the '90s I hope it becomes:   "Not all the world's DOS (ick)".

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1992 13:45:01 -0700 (PDT)

Mr. c-client is aware of this problem.

He is of the religion that states that addresses without a fully-qualified
domain name cannot possibly work well enough to ever be trusted.  Furthermore,
he feels that what bits are on the disk should be of little concern to the
user; if users want host-less addressing that is what their wonderful user
interfaces are supposed to accomplish for them.

However, he is also aware that circumstances force him to do something to
parse an address without a host name other than just toss it out.  And he is
also aware that it's all his fault that he sets that default host name to the
local host name and gives the main program no opportunity to change it.

So...  he is probably going to make that default host name be a global
variable that gets defaulted to the local host name if the main program
doesn't take care of it first.  This will hopefully solve the immediate hassle
in Pine.

However, that doesn't change his fundamental lack of sympathy for the idea
that it is ever reasonable to transmit e-mail bits without proper domain
names.  He has wasted entirely too many hours of his life in dealing with
something that is essentially invalid and undefined.

-- Mark --

---

From: Laurence Lundblade <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1992 13:58:06 -0700 (PDT)

Sounds good to me Mark. I will also happily reflect your advise in the
Pine tech-notes that use of this features is best considered a
transitionary measure until the site can get to the point where they can
use fully qualified host names. Thanks!

LL

On Wed, 23 Sep 1992, Mark Crispin wrote:

> Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1992 13:45:01 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
> To: Laurence Lundblade <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked], Bob Gregory <[email-masked]>
> Subject: Re: Domain names (fwd)
>