> On Aug 23, 2023, at 06:59, Doug McIntyre via mailop <mailop@mailop.org> wrote:
> ...
>
> The Sendmail configuration is mostly a pattern match based setup. For
> back when there were 100's of different email system addressing ways,
> and 100s of gateways between them. If they had to only deal with the
> way Internet mail works today, they would never have had to have the
> complexity seen in the base sendmail config.
>
> If we suddenly had to deal with the email address complexity of the 80's,
> all the other email servers would fall over dead.
That’s how I learned BSD4.3’s csh had a fun history expression “bug” (it caused
csh to coredump):
mail <uucp_path>!<user <mailto:u...@arpa.addr>>%<bitnet_relay>
No, I’m not making that up, that’s how I sent my girlfriend at Brown email.
I narrowed it down to a repro with “echo a!x%r”.
So email was so jacked up in the 80s the freakin’ shell couldn’t handle it.
Sean
PS For real grins, this was legit (if memory serves — I’d have to dig out the
6250 tape backups to confirm):
mail <uucp>!<uucp>!<user>%<domain.arpa>@<bitnet_relay>
Sendmail likely can still parse that (even properly).
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