Re: Fully-qualifying Email addresses in outgoing mail

[patl@cag.lcs.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti)]

Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> writes:

> It is common practice to give contractors very limited system
> access, only as much as they require to do their jobs, no more.

Yes, I think you have made it clear that the functionality I suggest
would not be useful to you.

> | It would be useful to 99.9% of all users, but not to you, so it should
> | not be offered as an option.  Very sensible.  Thanks for your help.
> 
> I would like to know where you get your numbers.

Think about it for 2 seconds, and you will find it obvious that *the
vast majority of systems do not have local mail delivery at all*.
Every box running Windows 9x, for example.  Almost every box running
NT.  Remember that wildcard MX record you mentioned earlier?  Gee, I
wonder why it was set up that way.

In a well-administered network, almost none of the Unix boxes do mail
delivery, either.  Email to "root" goes to the administrator of the
*network*.  See?

> Where I work we have 300 employees, about 1/3 of which use local
> mail on our development systems.

That sounds like a poorly-administered disaster.

> I do not really consider my slice of the world to be statistically
> useful, but 100 people is more than the "zero" you previously stated
> use local mail.

Compared to the world of Windows users, it's zero.  (And yes, the
whole point of this exercise from my point of view are the people
running Emacs on win32.  The Unix users just invoke qmail-inject.)

> So I think I have good reason not to go breaking local mail delivery
> simply because you think *all* mail must be Internet mail.

Yes, you do, because you are one of those unusual users for whom there
exists local mail delivery to break.

Did I forget to mention that I am suggesting an *option*?  That means
it would be optional.  That means you could opt out.  That means you
would not have to use it.

I agree that smtpmail itself might be a better place to fix this,
since it does not presently send valid SMTP mail.  But since
message-mode can already perform a variety of RFC822 canonicalizations
(like adding From, Message-ID, and Date), it is not much of a stretch
to throw another into the mix.

 - Pat