On Mon, 17 Nov 1997, Georg v.Zezschwitz wrote:
> I'm afraid Exim when invoked as rmail does not operate compliant
> to RFC 976.
>
> In RFC 976 (UUCP Mail Interchange Format Standard) the first line
> of a message passed on stdin to rmail is described as follow:
>
> The standard input of the command should begin with a single line
>
> From domain!user date remote from system
>
> followed immediately by the RFC-822 format headers and body of the
> message. It is possible that there will be additional From_ lines
> preceding this line - these lines may be added, one line for each
> system the message passes through. It is also possible that the
> "system" fields will be stacked into a single line, with many !'s in
> ...
> (it states a lot of difficult staff :-) )
>
> I don't know how to cope with this requirement correctly.
Exim does recognize input that starts with a "From " line, provided the
caller of Exim is a trusted user. See the description of the -bm option
in chapter 5. However, all it does is to take the sender as the string
that follows "From ".
> Another behaviour of Exim is that it wants the 'Date' part of
> the From_-line strictly in the international style. However,
> the popular German UUCP-program "Crosspoint" loves writing it
> a german way which might be wrong, but RFC 976 does not state
> how the date in the From_-line has to be formatted.
The next release of Exim has a different regex rule which recognizes
from lines with alternate date formats, since several programs seems to
use the form
From ph10 Fri, 7 Jan 97 14:00:00 GMT
RFC976 is indeed deficient in this respect. All it has is examples of
the form
From ph10 Fri Jan 5 12:35 GMT 1996
which is what I first implemented.
> Hope this helps some UUCP-guys,
Could some UUCP-experts please comment? Would it be helpful to make the
regex that recognizes "From " lines into an option that could be changed
in the configuration file? There could also be an option that specified
how to turn the result of the match into the sender address, rather like
the way the "gecos_" options work.
Philip
--
Philip Hazel University Computing Service,
ph10@??? New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
P.Hazel@??? England. Phone: +44 1223 334714
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