Re: Message ID's and News Gateways

[Peter Ziobrzynski <pz@modtor.emp.promis.com>]

> 
> Greetings:
> 
> 	SMTP sometimes sends out mail with parens () in the message id
> and this seems to throw off new-mail/mail-news gateways...  Is there
> any way to control the generation of this type of messages id's
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Marco
> 

I do not want to sound like a language purist but those gateways
are at fault and should be fixed. If you take a peek at RFC822
section 3.4.3 you will quickly find out that text in () is a valid
comment in the header fields.

To be a bit more constructive here is an example how I dealt with this
sort of problems:

My mail installation at work integrates VAX mail with the sendmail.
Sun provided DECnet mail gateway (dnimaild) was starting sendmail passing
bracketed comments at the command line (as part of the To: field).
You can imagine what it was doing the the sendmail.

I wrote a tiny shell script that removes all () from the command line
and pretends to be a sendmail:

#!/bin/sh
argv=`echo $* | sed 's/(.*)//'`
set -- $argv
sendmail $*


- peter
--
Peter Ziobrzynski, pz@modtor.emp.promis.com, Toronto, Ont. Canada