This might be a bit of a stupid question, but as I can't seem to find
the information anywhere I am still going to ask...

Are there any email programs that support the bangpath address format?
We have just made a very small network (three computers so far) and
wanted to send mail between them. Unfortunately alpine seems not very
fond of any address that doesn't contain an @ and mutt accepts it but
then postfix doesn't know how to deal with it.

From somewhere in cyberspace, Kyonshi <gmkeros@gmail.com> said:
>This might be a bit of a stupid question, but as I can't seem to find
>the information anywhere I am still going to ask...
>
>Are there any email programs that support the bangpath address format?
>We have just made a very small network (three computers so far) and
>wanted to send mail between them. Unfortunately alpine seems not very
>fond of any address that doesn't contain an @ and mutt accepts it but
>then postfix doesn't know how to deal with it.

Have you read this yet?

https://www.postfix.org/UUCP_README.html
--
Ed Ravin | Warning - this email may contain rhetorical
| devices, metaphors, analogies, typographical
eravin@ | errors, or just plain snarkiness. A sense of
panix.com | humor may be required for proper interpretation.

On 25.05.2024 um 22:32 Uhr Kyonshi wrote:

> This might be a bit of a stupid question, but as I can't seem to find
> the information anywhere I am still going to ask...
>
> Are there any email programs that support the bangpath address format?

IIRC this needs to be done on the MTA. You only use user@domain in your
MUA because the UUCP routing is different for every site and will be
handled by the MTA.
Sendmail and Postfix can handle UUCP, but I haven't tried that yet.

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Marco

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Marco Moock <mm+usenet-es@dorfdsl.de> wrote:
> On 25.05.2024 um 22:32 Uhr Kyonshi wrote:
>
>> This might be a bit of a stupid question, but as I can't seem to find
>> the information anywhere I am still going to ask...
>>
>> Are there any email programs that support the bangpath address format?
>
> IIRC this needs to be done on the MTA. You only use user@domain in your
> MUA because the UUCP routing is different for every site and will be
> handled by the MTA.
> Sendmail and Postfix can handle UUCP, but I haven't tried that yet.
>

I remember that I had a test setup at home with two machines linked
by a serial null modem. I'm sure I could use bang paths's as well as
domain style addresses. Well, that was about 15 years ago.

Maybe I had sendmail running as an MTA back then? Current postfix
converts bang path addresses to domain style.

mail(1) accepts bang path addresses in any case, and I think mutt as well.

cheers,

lkh
--
Laurens Kils-Hütten
https://sdf-eu.org/~lkh

I just tried to send mail to my account on sdf.org using
this address: sdf!lkh

Since sdf is listed when I run uuname on sdf-eu.org that
would be the proper uucp path.

Here's the error message I got from MAILER-DAEMON:

----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
<sdf!lkh>
(reason: Service unavailable)

Which means: netbsd's sendmail *doesn't* mangle bang style addresses,
and neither does mutt, the MUA I used to send the mail.

It probably doen't work because the uucp setup is not working
any more (quite likely) and this is rightly reported: Service
unavailable.

Cheers,

lkh

On 27.05.2024 um 17:14 Uhr lkh wrote:

> Which means: netbsd's sendmail *doesn't* mangle bang style addresses,
> and neither does mutt, the MUA I used to send the mail.

Is sendmail configured to use uucp?
IIRC this can be disabled.

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Marco

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Marco Moock <mm+usenet-es@dorfdsl.de> wrote:
> On 27.05.2024 um 17:14 Uhr lkh wrote:
>
>> Which means: netbsd's sendmail *doesn't* mangle bang style addresses,
>> and neither does mutt, the MUA I used to send the mail.
>
> Is sendmail configured to use uucp?
> IIRC this can be disabled.
>

I'm not sure, probably not, but the point was that said MUA
installation doesn't seem to rewrite bang path addresses.

Two things I learned:

1) netbsd's sendmail is actually postfix

2) postfix has a configuration parameter called

swap_bangpath

see https://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#swap_bangpath
or postconf(5). I'm doubtful that this setting is really
useful to have postfix work with bang path addresses as
expected.

With our approach of "experimental archaeology" in mind,
maybe it would be more useful, and possibly easier, to
write a simple MUA ourselves:

- use uucp / rmail to forward to other systems
- append to local mail spool whatever messages are
incoming.

what more would it need to do?

cheers,

lkh

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PGP: 487E D5A5 41A1 E9A7 07AD 4990 E34F 096D 35DE 0A86

lkh <lkh@sdf-eu.org> wrote:
> With our approach of "experimental archaeology" in mind,
> maybe it would be more useful, and possibly easier, to
> write a simple MUA ourselves:
>
> - use uucp / rmail to forward to other systems
> - append to local mail spool whatever messages are
> incoming.
>
> what more would it need to do?

I just tried to hand a test message with bang path address to
mail(1) (circumventing postfix entirely). Here's my transscript:

-----
$ cat incoming.mail >> /var/spool/mail/lkh # minimal MTA
$ mail
mail version v14.9.24. Type `?' for help
/var/spool/mail/lkh: 1 message 1 new
N 1 elrond!lkh Tue May 28 22:50 6/143 "bang path test "
? [-- Message 1 -- 6 lines, 143 bytes --]:
To: dwalin!lkh
Subject: bang path test
From: elrond!lkh

a test message with bang path address style
? r
To: elrond!lkh
Subject: Re: bang path test

mail(1) works with bang path addresses, no problem ...

-----

So I think this answers the original question ;-)

~lkh

--
write your own MTA!

On 28.05.2024 um 20:43 Uhr lkh wrote:

> 1) netbsd's sendmail is actually postfix

This is because the "sendmail" command is being used by many
applications and other MTAs need to be compatible with it.

You can install sendmail on NetBSD if you want the real one.

--
kind regards
Marco

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