Re: [exim] widen_domains misfeature

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Author: Philip Hazel
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] widen_domains misfeature
On Wed, 7 Sep 2005, Tony Finch wrote:

> We have for very many years supported abbreviated email addresses and they
> are still fairly frequently used.


The reason we had to support them was that before we had the Internet,
the UK academic community had a previous network in which email domain
abbreviation was supported and encouraged and, IIRC, not ambiguous. At
the changeover time, we had to retain some compatibility as otherwise
the Computing Service would have been heavily castigated by our user
community.

> This is an unpleasant loop-hole which I would like to fix. The only
> solution I can think of is to use two copies of the dnslookup router, one
> with widen_domains and one without. However this is a relatively ugly
> work-around; perhaps Exim should be hard-coded so that widen_domains only
> works for recipient addresses.


widen_domains was certainly only ever intended to be useful for
recipient addresses. What could probably trivially be done is to disable
widen_domains when verifying a sender address, which isn't quite what
you said, but I think is equivalent.

-- 
Philip Hazel            University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@???      Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
Get the Exim 4 book:    http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book