Neal Becker writes ("Re: commas"):
...
> Don't take my example too literally, I don't know for sure precisely
> what mreply was feeding to exim. I don't want to force exim to accept
> every silly thing that any mailer might produce, but if this is common
> usage (I don't know if it is or not) perhaps we should accept it.
I've been having a discussion (argument, perhaps) about more or less
this topic with the author of qmail.
It seems that with at least sendmail and smail, command line address
arguments are RFC822 recipient field bodies - they strip comments and
the "phrase" preceding a route-addr (<...>) and handle multiple
addresses separated by commas and probably the obscure foo:bar;
syntax.
In qmail command line arguments are unquoted addresses, one per
argument.
This has caused me problems with at least two pieces of software. The
variant of `cron' used by most Linux systems (Paul Vixie's
implementation) can be configured to mail to one or more addresses
using a MAILTO=... directive in the crontab. With most MTA's one can
specify several adddresses, as the MTA will separate them.
Another instance is a program I wrote myself has to pass mail around
whose headers it didn't generate, so that I want to specify the
addresses on the command line (using -t with messages with headers you
didn't generate is a bad idea for obvious reasons). The addresses
come out of the headers of incoming mail messages, and I don't want to
have to do RFC822 unquoting of addresses. Unfortunately qmail won't
let me work this way, and is incompatible with both Sendmail and
Smail.
I respectfully request that Exim follow Sendmail and Smail on this
issue, and treat command line addresses as RFC822 receipient field
bodies.
Thanks.
--
Ian Jackson ijackson@??? These opinions are my own.
Cambridge University Computer Laboratory, New Museums Site. + 44 1223 3 34676
Home: ijackson@??? Churchill College, CB3 0DS. + 44 1223 3 31579
PGP2 public key available. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/iwj10/
