Re: NetBSD & zmailer; sendmail-style aliases parsing

["Erik E. Fair" (Time Keeper) <fair@cesium.clock.org>]

At 8:57 -0700 4/28/97, Eugene Crosser wrote:

>Another difference, is "real-user" mechanizm:
>
>	networker: \root
>
>will deliver to /var/mail/root even if you have "root" aliased to somebody.
>Actually, this design is brain-dead in Sendmail (IMHO), but in Zmailer it
>is completely missing.  Personally I prefer a Smail3-like "real-user"
>scheme, a la:
>
>	networker: real-root
>
>and I have a six line patch to aliases.cf to implement this.  Matti, do you
>want it?
>
>Eugene

This is my principal complaint. This is not an 822 issue; this is a
local-part parsing issue, for a syntax that never leaves the host. What you
want is a syntax that will never show up in a real E-mail address (i.e. one
transmitted over the wire in SMTP), and never show up in a real user name
(from /etc/passwd or whatever your user name database is for your OS).

Sendmail's choice is unfortunate for its collision with one of RFC822's
quoting mechanisms, however I have never seen it cause a problem. I don't
like Eugene's (smail) suggestion because that potentially collides with
real (ahem!) user names (though I'm glad someone other than me has seen
this as a problem and worked on it some!).

I really want to be able to support:

\fair,
fair@foo.com

in my .forward files, and in /etc/aliases (for those who do not know, this
is sendmail's syntax for saying "leave one copy here in my system mailbox,
and send another copy to fair@foo.com" (It's also possible to put a
pipe/program delivery, or a direct-file delivery here)).

Sendmail's rules are explained in an "aliases(5)" manual page that comes
with the distribution. It would be a really good idea for there to be a
similar page for zmailer (potentially one for each different aliases.cf
file that one could use).

	Erik Fair <fair@clock.org>