/usr/ucb/mail doesn't handle rfc822 well

Steve Hubert hubert at blake.acs.washington.edu
Sat Oct 14 09:07:06 AEST 1989


Index: ucb 4.3BSD-tahoe

Description:
Using 4.3-tahoe /usr/ucb/mail and replying with little "r" to the
following message illustrates a couple problems.

>From someone Fri Oct 13 11:19:42 1989
From: Joe Someone <someone at sub.domain>
To: Fred Flintstone <fred at sub.domain>
Cc: cathy at other.domain, Ken Jones <ken>
Status: RO

Body of message.


Repeat-By:
Script started on Fri Oct 13 11:23:15 1989
% mail -f mail.bug
Mail version 5.3 2/18/88.  Type ? for help.
"mail.bug": 1 message
>   1 someone at sub.domain    Fri Oct 13 11:19   8/185 
& 1
Message 1:
>From someone Fri Oct 13 11:19:42 1989
From: Joe Someone <someone at sub.domain>
To: Fred Flintstone <fred at sub.domain>
Cc: cathy at other.domain, Ken Jones <ken>

Body of message.

& r
To: fred at sub.domain someone at sub.domain
Cc: sub.ken at domain
Subject: 
^C
(Interrupt -- one more to kill letter)
^CInterrupt
& x
% ^D 
script done on Fri Oct 13 11:23:41 1989

Fix:
There are two problems.  The first problem is that cathy didn't
make it into the list at all.  The second is that the ken address
is messed up.  It tried to add the sender's domain since ken didn't
have a domain but it did it incorrectly.  Instead of ken at sub.domain
it came out as sub.ken at domain.

The first problem is a problem with the skin() code in aux.c.  There seems 
to be an implicit assumption there that all of the addresses will be rfc 822
style if any of them are.  When it runs into the "<" it throws out everything
before that, including cathy at other.domain which should have been saved since
it came before the ",".  I haven't coded a fix but one can imagine how to do
it fairly easily.

The second problem comes from some strange mucking about in optim.c, in the
arpafix() routine.  I don't pretend to understand what is supposed to be
happening there.

Steve Hubert
Networks and Distributed Computing, Univ. of Wash., Seattle
hubert at cac.washington.edu



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