Re: Fully-qualifying Email addresses in outgoing mail

[Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

* patl@cag.lcs.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti)  on Fri, 10 Dec 1999
| > Second, a local mailbox is completely bound to the local machine.
| No.

Yes.  An Internet mailbox has a fully qualified domain part.  If the
mailbox has no fully qualified domain part, it cannot be an Internet mail
message.  It must be a local message because there is nothing else it could
be (I'm leaving things like X.400 out of it).

| So a user composing mail on a Windows laptop, which has no message
| queue, must type in a fully-qualified name every time?  Of course not.

That's what address books are for.

| If you type a name which is not fully-qualified, it is the system's job
| to figure out what you mean.  That may or may not mean a mailbox on the
| local system.  People working at FooCorp expect that "bozo" will be
| converted into "bozo@foo.com".  And the RFCs say such a conversion must
| happen before anything is sent via SMTP.

How do you intend to make this work reliably?  I have a machine that can
receive local mail just fine, but not network mail because it does not have
a full-time network connection.  For that I have a couple of MX records so
that network mail gets delivered to machines that have full-time network
connections.  `ratinox' and `ratinox@peorth.gweep.net' do *NOT* resolve to
the same mailbox.  By forcibly qualifying `ratinox' with a domain part, you 
ensure that the message gets delivered to the wrong mailbox.

| (The reason for this is obvious: Recipients in foreign domains need to
| see fully-qualified addresses or they can't follow-up.)

You have just switched gears.  To and Cc should never be rewritten for
canonicity, but because the user is sending to a foreign domain a fully
qualified domain part must exist in the To or Cc headers, so rewriting is
not necessary.

From, on the other hand, should always be rewritten for canonicity if it is
required.  But that is not what you were asking about before.

| > If it is rewritten for canonicity with a complete domain part, then
| > the message would be sent out to my MX host where I would have to
| > grab it via POP.

| Which would be superior behavior for almost all users.  And I am
| suggesting this as an option, not a requirement.

But it would still be wrong because I specified that the message be
delivered locally.

And by the way, the BBDB has mailbox completion.

[...]
| Do you agree that bare addresses must not appear in a SMTP message, as
| the RFC specifies?

Just to keep the terminology straight, it is an RFC 822 message.  SMTP is
RFC 821 (et al) and defines *how* a message gets from one machine to
another, not the format of the message.  RFC 822 defines the format of an
Internet mail message.  It says nothing about other mail message formats.

And yes, unqualified mailboxes are invalid in an RFC 822 message.  But a
message to be delivered to `patl' is *not* an RFC 822 (Internet mail)
message, as I pointed out before.

[...]
| Note that sendmail rewrites the addresses whether you invoke it from
| the command line or talk to it via smtp.  The latter is the only
| reason smtpmail.el works at all.

sendmail does not rewrite To or Cc.

| Qmail (correctly) only rewrites addresses when you invoke it on the
| command-line.  This behavior is configurable, of course.

Then qmail does the wrong thing by turning a local message into an Internet
message.  Adding qmail's brokenness to message will break message-mode.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.0g (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

iD8DBQE4UU+qgl+vIlSVSNkRAu9GAKDUNZ5ggzTQEbj2ei5uZ24EadPTtwCdFCHl
K33RJooDKSQzCkSnKND+Nvs=
=ZMWc
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-- 
Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net>    \ Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
Minion of Nathan - Nathan says Hi! \ 
PGP Key: at a key server near you!  \