> > I'm not sure its relevant. The whole address-rewriting thing is a
> > sendmail-ism that should just go away; it must have originated in an effort to
> > compensate for other, unrelated sendmail design flaws.
>
> It's all a historical thing. The problem that sendmail was designed to solve
> back in the uucp days is different from the problems that modern MTAs are
> designed to solve. The hardest part of uucp mail was the address rewriting,
> so sendmail went through amazing contortions in order to solve this problem.
> Internet mail doesn't need to do any rewriting at all, so the bulk of the code
> in sendmail is there to solve a problem most of us don't have.
>
> I was fortunate in never having actually been stuck on the end of a uucp link,
> but even in those days sendmail's rewriting rules often got in the way of just
> getting the mail there.
Absolutely. I used to do a lot of uucp with qmail and the best thing
you can do is forget about rewriting and ! addresses. uucp does not
insist on this, though it's as ingrained as many other myths
surrounding mail (and dns). What uucp does do well is transfer a file
and execute a command remotely - so conceptually one simple wants to
transfer the email contents and run a command at the other end that
injects it into qmail.
The best thing to do is just use FQDN addresses and avoid all
rewriting. There is some references to this on www.qmail.org and I'm
sure much of this has been previously discussed and thus archived.
Regards.
