[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 108, Issue 2

[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 108, Issue 2

[Doug Merritt]

Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>If the original BBN code had
>been left alone, since most people did not have the issues Berkeley did,
>they would never have bothered with sendmail.cf.

Now I might be badly wrong, but nonetheless this strikes me as
badly revisionist history.

The motivation for sendmail.cf was the collision of multiple
namespaces (Arpanet, Bitnet, Usenet, etc.), each implemented
in varying nonstandard ways by different mail clients and servers,
resulting in messes like "IJQ3SRA%UCLAMVS.BITNET%SU-LINDY at SU-CSLI.ARPA",
as one of many, many examples, as observed in the famous

  "The Hideous Name", Rob Pike & P.J. Weinberger, 1985
  http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rsc/pike85hideous.pdf

The thing is, although sendmail.cf was/is itself hideous to understand
and therefore make maintenance changes to (although I have), it is
quite capable of actually handling the above kinds of messes, and
being extended to handle new messes as they turn up.

In short, it got the job done, despite its weaknesses.

I may be wrong, but it was my strong impression that, back in the
day, this could not be said of anyone else's code, BBN or otherwise.
   Doug Merritt

[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 108, Issue 2

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 27 Nov 2013, at 03:22, Doug Merritt wrote:

> I may be wrong, but it was my strong impression that, back in the
> day, this could not be said of anyone else's code, BBN or otherwise.

Perhaps there is someone here who remembers this better than I do, but in the UK there were some fairly seriously heroic things that had to be done because we had the wrong order for names, and there were then all sorts of really exciting ambiguities resulting from that (what did "cs.x.edu" mean?).  May be another tool would have been better than sendmail, but whatever it was would have been pretty hairy.