Re: SCHEME for FULL-SPEC RETURN PATH

["Jon 'Iain' Boone" <boone@psc.edu>]

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Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>  writes:
>
> > From: Matthew J Ghio <mg5n+@andrew.cmu.edu>
> > 
> > You send mail to remail+getid@x.edu.
> 
> Is this some kind of RFC822 hack?  It doesn't work on my system.  Mail to
> hfinney+xyz@shell.portal.com bounces.  Are you assuming some special
> mail address processing has been installed by the administrators of the
> machines to handle this "+" hack, or is my machine broken in not respecting
> it?

 After referencing my copy of RFC 822, it doesn't seem (after a quick glance)
 to allow for user+misc@foo.bar.edu -- I'll have to check more carefully 
 tomorrow.  In any case, I (and I assume Mr. Ghio) was introduced to the "+"
 symantic by the Andrew Message System.  The "+" is used as a delimiter
 for sub-mailboxes for each mail address.  Thus, Mr. Ghio is capable of
 having the mailbox "mg5n+", "mg5n+faq" or "mg5n+biff".  They all get
 delivered to the same person, but Mr. Ghio can set up the "+biff" mailbox
 to re-distribute to all of USENET, after "BIFFing" up the post.  Or he
 can have "+faq" mail back to you the faq you have requested.  You can
 also have it automatically file away (read: kill or not!) your mail 
 based on address.  When I was the comp.os.mach faq maintainer, I had the
 mail to jb3o+mach@andrew.cmu.edu go to a special mailbox which I read
 only comp.os.mach faq mail from.  The Filtering Language for Andrew
 MEssage System (FLAMES) is a lisp-like language which allows you (the user)
 to write various macros for mail-refiling.

 In any case, it does require some hacking to your SMTP server to get it
 to accept user+misc@domain style mail.  (Basically, a rule which recognizes
 the string "user" as the mailbox to deliver to, ignoring the "+misc" part.)
 Once it does accept it, then your user agent can deal with what to do with
 the "+misc" part.  Of course, the precludes the remailers from running on
 machines which the remailer operator does not have root on (or it requries
 us to use something other than port 25 for running our servers...).  But,
 in order to maintain the integrity of the log files (by insuring that there
 are not any), a remailer operator needs to have root permissions anyhow...

 By the way, Matthew, please drop me a copy of the source code... I've
 made /afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr/jb3o/remailer readable and writable by you.

 Jon Boone | PSC Networking | boone@psc.edu | (412) 268-6959 | PGP Key # B75699
 PGP Public Key fingerprint =  23 59 EC 91 47 A6 E3 92  9E A8 96 6A D9 27 C9 6C

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