[Mailman-Developers] Wildly OT - qmail and mangling (was: mailman and the web)

[J C Lawrence]

On Sun, 18 Mar 2001 22:33:54 -0500 
Jay R Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 18, 2001 at 05:37:21PM -0800, Jerry Asher wrote:
>> Qmail has wonderful behavior that supports my mangling of the
>> reply-to address.  You can send a message to me at
>> jerry@hollyjerry.org, or jerry-junk@hollyjerry.org, or
>> jerry-webvan@ or you can put anything after the hyphen.  It will
>> get to me all the same, OR I can set up qmail in a procmail like
>> fashion to pass the message to a script which can filter the
>> messages based on the data after the hyphen.  So one way to
>> encode the bbs thread data is to set the reply to
>> "bboard-thread-2FC24@mybboard.com".

> Typical djb mistake.  

While he reinvented common practice (a definite DJB-ism) he hardly
violated any standard -- +-addressing is still mostly larval.

> There's been a defined protocol for that that well predates qmail
> (unless I'm much mistaken); the defined character is a "+".  No,
> it's not a formal standard... but it's apparently a widely defined
> informal standard.

Every MTA I'm aware of that supports +-addressing mandates having
the extension character set as part of the feature configuration.
I've seen both '-' and '+' commonly used over tha last decade ro so
outside of DJB circles.  IIRC the early Sendmail patches for
+-addressing used '-' by default until enough people yelled at Eric
that it was too confusing and tended to screw up their other
scripts.

> Tampa Bay, Florida http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 804 5015

Do Tim et al still do the Weds night/Sunday brunch meets?

-- 
J C Lawrence                                       claw@kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--