BSD 4.2 Mail not RFC822-compliant?

Guy Harris guy at auspex.UUCP
Wed Dec 14 10:43:35 AEST 1988


>The problem is that the To: address does not have an "@dom.ain" part.
>For reasons I was not able to pin down, both the To: and the From:
>address need to be either fully domain'ed or non-domain'ed ("fritz")
>but having mixtures produces this problem.

I think part of the problem may be that the 4.2BSD version of Mail got
confused by the "." when it constructed the address for the reply; it
may think that "." is a Berknet addressing character or something.  This
may be fixed in the 4.3BSD version.

>/usr/ucb/Mail very badly needs an overhaul; the AT&T folks basically
>have already done it, and called the result mailx.  It is interesting to
>note that Sun's /usr/ucb/Mail is actually mailx.

I don't know that "mailx" is a complete overhaul; they added a bunch of
stuff, and may have cleaned up some things, but one thing they didn't
touch was the address parsing.  The 4.2BSD "Mail" and S5R2 "mailx" had a
parser that claimed to be an RFC733 parser; the 4.3BSD "Mail" and S5R3
"mailx" picked up an updated parser I did that claims to be an RFC822
parser, although there are still some holes in it.

The generation of "unl:fritz at edu" is, I suspect, due to the problem I
cited above.  However, the SunOS 4.0 "Mail", which is derived from the
S5R2 "mailx" but has a bunch of 4.3BSD "Mail" and other fixes, including
my updated parser, still generates two "fritz at unocss.unl.edu" in the
"To:" line when you do "replyall".



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