** Sometime around 03:18 -0500 02/03/99, Debra Wilson said:

>I submit that this is not a solution; it's a kludge.  The solution would
>be to comply with RFC821 et al. and remove or turn off the case-sensitivity
>in the mailer.  If the mail admins can make an alias they should be able
>to fix the standards compliance problem.  RFC821 says quite bluntly that
>"Host names are not case sensitive." (RFC821 p. 3)
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>No.... there is no reason to assume that because someone can type some text
>into an aliases file that they can edit the code of the various mail programs
>and change it to comply with RFC821....
>
>and until companys stop trying to grab more of the market share by refusing to
>comply with standards in the hope of trapping consumers into their products
>then editing an alias file is probably the only option left to those who have
>to try and make the damn things work they way people want them to...

Well, we're talking about EDS here -- one might reasonably assume that
they have at least one sysadmin who can handle sendmail rewriting rules,
and reformat the mail for a downstream MTA that cannot handle uppercase
host names. (Agreed that failure to comply with an RFC that has been
published for nearly 20 years now is beyond being even marginally
defensible.) If it's not sendmail that is handling the incoming mail,
then it would be pretty easy to stick a Solaris or Linux (or whatever
flavor you happen to like) box at the "front," MX to it, and insert a
rule that rewrites the host names to be lowercase on ALL inbound mail.
Might take more than one box; EDS can afford a few high-end PCs, I'm
sure.

To have to modify an alias file to handle uppercase host names indicates
an internal procedure that is very, very broken. There are simply too
many sites out there that do not always use lowercase FQDNs --
Reference.COM, for example. Better to fix the problem than continue to
patch it.

All IMO, of course.

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