Ok. I wasn't around on the list in December when this was first discussed,
but I'd like to revisit it. :)
>From the list archive:
Philip Hazel (ph10@???)
Tue, 2 Dec 1997 08:59:29 +0000 (GMT):
It could, I suppose, but is it worth the work when #domain probably does
essentially the same thing? At the moment, it simply does a textual scan
of the recipient addresses; it does not analyse them into local parts
and domains. It would have to do this and it would have to record which
kind of search it was doing. At the moment, it in effect just runs Exim
with the existing -R option.
I've just re-read the RFC and remembered why I used # and not @. What
Exim actually does with the -R option is attempt to deliver any message
that contains an address that matches - but it tries *all* the addresses
in that message, not just the one that matched. Thus the string given is
in some sense a means of identifying a particular set of messages. To
implement @ (deliver only to addresses in the given domain) would
require a lot more apparatus to be built.
And from RFC 1985:
5. The extended ETRN command
The extended ETRN command is issued by the client host when it wishes
to start the SMTP queue processing of a given server host. The
syntax of this command is as follows:
ETRN [<option character>]<node name><CR><LF>
5.3 Use Of ETRN to release mail for a subdomain or queue
If the requesting server wishes to release all of the mail for a
given subdomain, a variation on the ETRN command can be used. To
perform this request, the option character '@' should be used in
front of the node name. In this manner, any domain names that are
formed with a suffix of the specified node name are released.
For example, if the command ETRN @foo.com was issued, then any
accumulated mail for fred.foo.com, a.b.c.d.e.f.g.foo.com or foo.com
may be released. It should be noted that the receiving side of the
ETRN command should make a decision based on the client in question
and only allow certain combinations for each of the nodes. This is
more of a security issue than anything else.
In a similar vein, it might be necessary under some circumstances to
release a certain queue, where that queue does not correspond to a
given domain name. To this end, the option character '#' can be used
to force the processing of a given queue. In this case, the node
name would be used as a queue name instead, and its syntactical
structure would be dependant on the receiving server. An example of
this would be using the command ETRN #uucp to force the flush of a
UUCP queue. Note that the use of this option is entirely a local
matter and there is no way for a client to find a list of any such
queues that exist.
And finally from me:
The syntax in 5 above implies that both "@" and no option character need
to be allowed, and yet exim allows neither. It also seems that from the
3rd paragraph of 5.3 above, that using "#" in place of "@" isn't
appropriate either since that is for cases where the queue doesn't match a
domain name.
So I guess my question is "What are the plans for ETRN in exim supporting
'@' and no option character in the near future?" :) We're going to be
ditching sendmail in favor of exim on our relays in the near future, and
the current implementation of ETRN in exim will break some of our dialup
SMTP customers where their gateways issue ETRN in the form of "@domain" or
just "domain".
Thanks,
Tabor
--
________________________________________________________________________
Tabor J. Wells twells@???
Shore.Net Systems Admin. Just another victim of the ambient morality
--
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