> Date: Tue, 27 Aug 1996 17:11:39 -0400
> From: Daniel Hagerty <hag @
ai .
mit .
edu>
> Subject: Re: Code Review Guidelines (draft)
>
> > From: ichudov @
algebra .
com (Igor Chudov @ home)
> > Date: Tue, 27 Aug 1996 11:20:56 -0500 (CDT)
> > Look at your sendmail.cf file for a humongous amount of
> > email parsing rules.
>
> Much better, look at rfc822. (I wouldn't consider *anything* that
> has the word "sendmail" in it a good reference).
>
> Hostnames will match the regexp [-A-Za-z0-9.]; those are the only
> legal characters in the hostname portion. Usernames
> ("domain-dependent local string") are much harder to what is and isn't
> legal. Read rfc822.
RFC822 tells what should be, which is fine as far as it goes. The
sendmail config files I've read (especially in the beginning, before
companies started stripping out things that weren't designed just for
their mail programs) tended to include all sorts of interesting odd
addressing parsing rules, because those were the addresses that people
were actually seeing. They were cobbled together out of pragmatic
experience. For a lot of those odd mail systems, there wasn't any set
of parsing rules, just hacks shrugging and saying, well, that's what it
is and that's what it does. Later, companies' config files also
started including parsing rules for their proprietary mail systems,
such as DECmail.
No, sendmail parsing rules aren't a perfect reference. I have yet to
find any that aren't broken in one of a couple of ways that I've come
to recognize (and I'll bet that if you read mine, you'll find that I
made some silly mistake, degree in Logic or no). But for some types of
mail addresses, they're the best references because they're the only
references.
Even though I had thought I understood the "important" parts of RFC822,
I didn't understand the source routing and explicit group parts until I
had to deal with them in a sendmail.cf file.
--
Joe Yao jsdy @
cospo .
osis .
gov - Joseph S. D. Yao
COSPO Computer Support EMT-A/B
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