Re: Fully-qualifying Email addresses in outgoing mail

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

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

> If I understand what you want, I think what you want is broken.  It is
> critically important to remember two things:
> 
> First, an RFC 822 mailbox has absolutely no relationship whatsoever with
> the machine on which the message is composed or from what machine it is
> submitted to the MTA.

Yes.

> Second, a local mailbox is completely bound to the local machine.

No.

> If I have `To: ratinox', the message should be delivered locally because
> that is what I have told my local MTA to do.

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.
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.

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

> 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.

> This is not something unique to qmail, by the way.  To and Cc should never
> be rewritten.  If qmail-inject is rewriting To and Cc mailboxes, it is
> doing something wrong.

Do you agree that bare addresses must not appear in a SMTP message, as
the RFC specifies?  So it is a *bug* that message-mode/smtpmail (blame
whichever you like) generates SMTP messages with such addresses in
them.  I am requesting a way to avoid this buggy behavior.  One option
would be for smtpmail to refuse to send such messages; I am suggesting
something more useful.

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.

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

I think it is quite unlikely that both sendmail and qmail-inject are
"doing something wrong" in their default configurations.

 - Pat