Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/faqs/comp/answers/mail/addressing

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Path: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!eecs-usenet-02.mit.edu!news.kei.com!nntprelay.mathworks.com!howland.erols.net!feed1.news.erols.com!News.NetUSA.Net!eli!not-for-mail
From: [e-mail] (Eli Pogonatus)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc,news.admin.net-abuse.email,news.software.readers,comp.answers,news.answers
Subject: Email Addressing FAQ (How to use user+box@host addresses)
Supersedes: <eli$[e-mail]>
Followup-To: comp.mail.misc
Date: 23 Oct 1997 19:45:04 GMT
Organization: Some absurd concept
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Approved: [e-mail]
Message-ID: <eli$[e-mail]>
NNTP-Posting-Host: alpha.netusa.net
X-Trace: news.netusa.net 877635904 1727 (None) 204.141.0.10
X-Complaints-To: [e-mail]
Summary: How to add and use submailboxes to your email address.
Xref: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu comp.mail.misc:42190 news.admin.net-abuse.email:104694 news.software.readers:47145 comp.answers:28650 news.answers:115240

Archive-name: mail/addressing
Last-modified: (06/10/97 14:32:39)
URL: http://www.netusa.net/~eli/faqs/addressing.html
Reason-for-last-modification: MMDF updated, Pine updated
Reason-for-previous-modification: Added mention of zsh where appropriate,
        fixed qmail compile option

   If you can add information PLEASE DO. This is Unix centric because I
   have answers for Unix, not because I am trying to shun other
   platforms.

Questions covered
                                 __________

    1. What?
    2. Why?
    3. Things to consider
    4. With qmail, how?
    5. With sendmail, how?
    6. With MMDF, how?
    7. With other MTAs, how?
    8. With mutt, how?
    9. With elm, how?
   10. Using them in trn, how?
   11. Using them in slrn, how?
   12. Using them in tin, how?
   13. Using them in nn, how?
   14. Using them in Gnus, how?
   15. Using them in knews, how?
   16. Using them in MH, how?
   17. Using them in pine, how?
   18. Using them elsewhere, how?
   19. Any other addressing suggestions?

     * Appendix
         1. General format of a From: header
         2. Filtering
         3. A word on address types
         4. Comprehensive plan for a new account
         5. Verifying Email Addresses

   A good many of the examples in this FAQ are for a generic user, Alice,
   who receives mail at bobs-home.com. Her "login" at that host is
   "alice" and she uses boxes called "mail" and "news" in the localpart
   of her address. (The word "localpart" comes from RFC 822 which defines
   the now standard internet email address. It refers to the portion of
   the email address before the "@".) Bobs-home.com uses sendmail, and
   the examples reflect that.

   I find this a slightly more interesting way of giving examples than
   the crude "[e-mail]" and
   "[e-mail]" that earlier versions of this FAQ used.

Questions and answers:
                                 __________

    1. What?

       Mail transfer agents (MTAs) usually deliver mail to a single
       location for each user on the system. There are ways of having
       mail sent to more than one email address being delivered to the
       same user. The simplest conceptually is a mail alias. Aliases
       affect the whole machine and generally can only be set up by
       administrators. This is not convenient for anyone involved. So
       some MTAs have special ways of creating user level aliases. To
       keep these from interfering with other aspects of mail on the
       machine, these addresses are the username with a piece of
       punctuation and a boxname appended.
                              ___________________

    2. Why?

       Traditionally it has been useful for special sorting of mail, eg
       [e-mail], [e-mail],
       [e-mail], etc. so that each of Anna, Beth, and
       Cathy send mail to a particular address and it gets treated
       specially. These days it is becoming popular as a way of providing
       special filtering (such as with procmail) on email addresses
       exposed to insecure channels such as Usenet.

       Nancy McGough's Filtering Mail FAQ, available at the URLs below,
       is a good start to finding out how to filter once you have the use
       of these addresses. See also the appendix of this FAQ.

        FAQ "launchers" for the Filtering Mail FAQ:

               o
                 http://www.ii.com/internet/faqs/launchers/mail/filtering-
                 faq/
               o http://www.best.com/~ii/faqs/archive/mail/filtering-faq/

        FTP sites for the Filtering Mail FAQ:

               o
                 ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/mail/filtering
                 -faq (and at the rtfm mirror sites)
               o ftp://ftp.netusa.net/users/eli/mail.filtering-faq.txt
                 (not strongly recommended)
                              ___________________

    3. Things to consider

       For these to be useful you really must have several things working
       together. Some of these things require system administrator
       privileges to implement, if they are not working on your system
       already, some do not. Some programs are as easy to configure as
       adding a line by hand to the headers shown, others require
       patching the code and recompiling. Hopefully the patches will
       become part of the official distributions, when needed, to prevent
       too much duplication of effort.

       Of primary importance, your system will need a mail transfer agent
       (MTA) that can understand these addresses when there is an attempt
       to give them to the system. Installing the MTA is definitely a
       task for a system administrator. In some cases, configuring the
       MTA will be as well.

       As a secondary, but not much less important, concern you will need
       to be able to configure the various user-level mail handing
       programs to use these aliases. There has not been a lot of
       interest in these in the past, so very few programs make it easy
       to do. The interest in filtering spam sent to addresses culled
       from Usenet has made configuring news posters my primary concern
       for this. I would like to add Q&As for mail user agents (MUAs),
       those programs that generally act as a user interface to mail, but
       I do not have a strong familiarity with any myself.

       As a last concern, you will want to know how to filter and sort
       mail for maximum effectiveness. The appendix currently has that
       information. Stephen R. van den Berg's procmail utility, available
       in source form at
       <URL:ftp://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/packages/procmail/>,
       is probably the best tool around. I found it difficult to learn
       without lots of well-documented examples, so I have tried to
       provide examples here.
                              ___________________

    4. With qmail, how?

       Qmail is an MTA.

       Dave Sill <[e-mail]> told me that with qmail all
       Alice has to do is "touch ~/.qmail-news" to indicate that she
       wants to receive mail at <[e-mail]>. Or she can
       put the name of a mailbox in the file and mail will be delivered
       there. If she doesn't have the .qmail-news file mail will normally
       be bounced. She can also use a .qmail-default file to catch any
       other case.

       If her .qmail is a single line consisting of just "#" all her mail
       will silently be dropped. This might be a useful way to force
       people to only send mail to her sub-boxes. She should be sure to
       have files specified for her other mail, however. Since silently
       discarding mail is the same as getting it and not responding (to
       an outside observer), arranging to have the mail bounce might be
       more useful. She could put a single line consisting of "| exit
       100" there which will send a bland bounce message in the typical
       qmail fashion.

       This is a user level configuration; it creates boxes of the form
       <[e-mail]>.

       (At qmail compile time you can change the '-' delimiter to any
       character you wish. Version 1.00, change the value of
       USEREXT_BREAK in conf-unusual.h. Version 1.01, change the file
       "conf-break". Both require a recompile to take effect. This may
       seem trivial, but '-' is a legitimate character in a Unix username
       and I have seen it used.)
                              ___________________

    5. With sendmail, how?

       Sendmail is an MTA.

       Phil Edwards <[e-mail]> talked about how to do it
       with sendmail. Quoting him, because it doesn't paraphrase well,
       "The usual setup is in ruleset 5, consisting of a couple lines
       like


        R$+ + *         $#local $@ $&h $: $1
        R$+ + $*        $#local $@ $2 $: $1 + *

   with another one or two later on in the same ruleset. (I'm doing this
       from memory; it'll probably differ from your .cf.) From there,
       it's up to your local delivery program." He suggests using
       procmail as the local delivery program; refer to the procmail
       installation instructions for (a little) more information.

       This is an admin level configuration; it creates boxes of the form
       <[e-mail]>. Once sendmail is configured, usage
       of the mailboxes is user controlled. Recent releases of sendmail
       come with this working already. (You can try to send yourself mail
       at login+boxname to see if this is already set up on your system.
       If not, you'll need to contact your system administrator.)
                              ___________________

    6. With MMDF, how?

       MMDF is an MTA.

       Jerry Sweet, maintainer of the MMDF FAQ, has provided this
       detailed answer.

     MMDF has long had an addressing feature of the form
     "mailbox=string", which causes a message so addressed to be
     delivered to "mailbox". The whole address, including the "=string"
     part, appears in the $(address) variable for use in your
     .maildelivery file.

     An application note on how to use MMDF's "=" addressing feature to
     pre-sort incoming mail is available at this URL:

     http://www.irvine.com/~mmdf/auto-sort/index.html

     Note that MMDF doesn't preserve the "=string" information for use
     following delivery, so all handling of the $(address) information
     must take place at delivery time, using the .maildelivery file. So,
     in order to take advantage of MMDF's "=" addressing feature, you
     must use local delivery as opposed to POP delivery. (In other
     words, you need a login account on the same host that runs MMDF.)

     For detailed information about using the "=" feature in one's
     $HOME/.maildelivery file, refer to the MMDF maildelivery(5) on-line
     man page.

       This is a user level configuration; it creates boxes of the the
       form <alias=[e-mail]>.
                              ___________________

    7. With other MTAs, how?

       Nobody responded with smail, exim, etc solutions.

       If you are using the Andrew Messaging System (AMS), which you
       probably are if you have any other Andrew stuff on your system,
       then you have all of this already. In fact AMS introduced the
       concept. Read the documentation on FLAMES to find out how to use
       this.
                              ___________________

    8. With mutt, how?

       Mutt is a MUA.

       To change the from header, Alice in her .muttrc defines additional
       lines with the command "my_hdr":


my_hdr From: [e-mail] (Alice)

       To just change the Reply-to: header, she can use:


my_hdr Reply-To: [e-mail] (Alice)
                              ___________________

    9. With elm, how?

       Elm is a MUA.

       Elm stores extra headers to be used in mail in a .elm/elmheaders
       file in her home directory. She just needs to add a From: and/or
       Reply-To: header in that file and it will be used automatically.
       The headers should be properly formatted for mail. The appendix
       has sample formats acceptable for a from line.
                              ___________________

   10. Using them in trn, how?

       Trn is a newsreader.

       Trn uses two environment variables, NEWSHEADER and MAILHEADER, to
       control the headers that appear in posts and replies respectively.
       For the default values Alice can read the man page for her copy of
       trn. In the comprehensive plan for a new account there is a sample
       configuration for trn. Suffice to say that she can add a from
       header herself with those variables, or she can add one by hand
       every time she sends mail or news. (I use a combination approach
       myself.)

       Note that newer versions of trn can be controlled by a user level
       configuration file to do this stuff, so she doesn't need to
       clutter the environment. The documentation should cover this.
                              ___________________

   11. Using them in slrn, how?

       Slrn is a newsreader.

       Alice can add to her .slrnrc:

username "alice-news"

   With newer versions of slrn, she can set them per-group with the
       article_mode_hook in the .slrn.sl file.
                              ___________________

   12. Using them in tin, how?

       Tin is a newsreader.

       Some versions of tin use the USER environment variable to generate
       the local part of the email address. Here are two aliases
       resetting it just while using tin:

        csh or tcsh
                alias tin "env USER=alice+news tin"

        ksh, bash, or zsh
                alias tin="env USER=alice+news tin"

       If you already have a tin alias, it will not be used. Both aliases
       will still allow you to give arguments to tin normally.

       Apparently there are some versions of the "unofficial" tin
       floating about that would allow her to set a "forged" address from
       the menu of configuration options. These are probably not too
       commonly installed.
                              ___________________

   13. Using them in nn, how?

       Nn is a newsreader.

       As in trn, Alice can add the from line by hand while posting or
       configure nn to add them all the time. To get the latter, she
       would add this to her .nn/init file:


set news-header From: Alice <[e-mail]>

       She should be careful using semicolons (;) in it, unless escaped
       they separate lines. The appendix has sample formats acceptable
       for a from line. There is a mail-header setting for replies which
       works the same way. In an over-zealous interpretation of RFC 1036,
       nn will add a sender header to her posts with her un-boxed
       address. I don't know any way around this. Using my inews may
       work, but I have not tried.
                              ___________________

   14. Using them in Gnus, how?

       Gnus is a newsreader and MUA.

       To change them in news she adds to her .gnus:

(setq message-default-news-headers
      "From: Alice <[e-mail]>\n")

   For news and mail she can change message-default-headers instead. The
       appendix describes the consideration for a From: header.

       If she would also use Gnus to read and filter your mail, she can
       add an entry like the following to nnmail-split-fancy:


("to" "alice\\+news"
  (| ("subject" "re:.*" "misc")
     ("references" ".*@.*" "misc")
     "spam"))

       This says that all mail to this address is suspect, but if it has
       a Subject that starts with a Re: or has a References header, it's
       probably ok, and will be put in the "misc" group. All the rest
       goes to the "spam" group. This combines filters I use with those
       used by Tim Pierce.

       This will sort virtually everything into the right group. She
       still must check the "spam" group from time to time to check for
       legitimate mail, though.

       See the Info documentation for nnmail-split-fancy for details and
       variations.

       Mark T. Gray offers this further advice:

     Also gnus rather unfortunately will insert a Sender: line if it
     finds that the From: line has a different username than it thinks
     it should. To correct this put the following function redefinition
     in your .gnus file:


(defun message-make-sender ()
  "Return the \"real\" user address.
This replaces the function in message.el which tries to ignore all
user modifications, and give as trustworthy answer as possible."
  (cadr (mail-extract-address-components (message-fetch-field "from"))))

       It basically will return the same name as you stuck in her From:
       field above and gnus is then happy to leave out the Sender: line.
       Era Eriksson points out that this behavior is a configurable
       option of Gnus:


(nconc message-syntax-checks '((sender . disabled)) )

     This will preserve any existing overrides for message-syntax-checks
     by merely adding (sender . disabled) to the end of any preset
     values. If the variable is already being set e.g. in your site-wide
     initialization files, you should still be able to use this without
     clobbering anything.

       Another very useful function to put in her .gnus is the following
       hook which will query the user for the alias to add on the
       username whenever she sends a message:


(defun my-address-choice ()
  "This function chooses which alias-suffix to use"
  (interactive)
  (let ((alias-suffix (read-string "Which alias-suffix: ")) (alias))
    (setq alias
           (concat user-login-name "+" alias-suffix "@bobs-home.com")
          mail-default-reply-to alias
          user-mail-address     alias)
    (message "%s" alias)))

(add-hook 'message-header-setup-hook 'my-address-choice)

       One person I have corresponded with is uncertain that will work
       and believes it to be of dubious value anyway. Caveat emptor. All
       of this question was written with Gnus 5.x in mind. I don't know
       how much will apply to earlier versions.
                              ___________________

   15. Using them in knews, how?

       Knews is a newsreader.

       David Kennedy says that to use these, Alice needs to put a line in
       the Knews file like:


Knews.mailName:         alice+news

       He also offers the warning "knews = executable, Knews = config
       file." David was using version 0.9.8 when he offered the advice.
                              ___________________

   16. Using them in MH, how?

       Answer submitted by Philip Guenther. I had thought that MH was an
       MTA/MUA, but apparently it has a news section or I am confused.

       If you already have a components file for comp(1), then you just
       need to add a Reply-To: or From: line to it. Be aware that if you
       add a From: line then a Sender: line with your plain address will
       be added by post(8), so your plain address will appear somewhere
       in the message.

       If you don't already have a components file then create on in your
       MH mail directory (probably $HOME/Mail), that contains:


To:
Cc:
Subject:
--------

       then follow the previous directions. In order for replies and
       forwards to have the additional header you'll need to create or
       edit replcomp and forwcomp file, and then tell repl and forw to
       use them by editing your .mh_profile to include lines like:


repl: -form replcomp
forw: -from forwcomp

       For the default entries for those file check the repl and forw
       manpages.
                              ___________________

   17. Using them in pine, how?

       Pine is a MUA and newsreader.

       Pine tries to protect users from details and folly/ignorance, so
       it is not easy. It requires editing the source code and
       recompiling. If you feel up to it, here's how to do it.

       Edit the file pine/osdep/os-xxx.h of the source where xxx is the
       3-letter abbreviation for your platform. Uncomment out the section
       which applies to "ALLOW_CHANGING_FROM". Compile. Run it. Go to the
       pine configuration control/menu and add an entry in
       "customized-hdrs" for your new From: header. The appendix has
       sample formats acceptable for a from line.

       Nancy McGough has a good web page on this that goes into more
       detail. See it at either
       <URL:http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/changing_from/> or
       at
       <URL:http://www.best.com/~ii/internet/messaging/pine/changing_from
       />.
                              ___________________

   18. Using them elsewhere, how?

       Well, if Alices uses sendmail directly to send mail (as I often
       do) it is pretty obvious how. Otherwise, I am not sure. Netscape
       and other programs which ask her to provide her own address will
       doubtlessly accept these addresses readily.

       If she uses a program which has inews inject news into an NNTP
       server, you might find the mini inews that I have hacked up
       useful. It works like inews with programs that use it in one of
       these forms:

          + inews -h < file (new inews)
          + inews < file (old inews)
          + inews -h file (new inews)
          + inews file (old inews)
       Anything that counts on command line options working is going to
       be disappointed. Older versions of lynx and all versions of rn,
       trn and nn that I know use inews in this fashion.

       This mini inews is from nn by way of lynx and has a number of
       hacks and bug fixes by me. Of primary concern is that it is now
       influenced by a NEWSMAILBOX environment variable when generating
       the From: header. If you would like to use it, the source is kept
       at ftp://ftp.netusa.net/users/eli/mini-inews.tgz in a tar/gzip
       file.

       Alice would use one of these two set ups with this:
         A. In her .login or her shell rc file (.cshrc or .tcshrc) for
            csh or tcsh she would have:
            setenv NEWSMAILBOX +news
         B. For sh/ksh/bash/zsh she would have this in her .profile:
            NEWSMAILBOX=+news
            export NEWSMAILBOX
                              ___________________

   19. Any other addressing suggestions?

       RFC822 is a long and complex document for those without strong
       computer science backgrounds. Parts of it will be understandable
       to most who read it, parts will not. Among other things it
       specifies how email addresses can be formatted. News and SMTP mail
       use RFC822 addresses. If she changes her address to one that is
       equivalent but written differently, she may be able to use
       procmail or another filtering tool process them.

       In particular the case sensitivity (upper vs. lower) of the
       localpart (that which comes before the @ reading left to right) is
       at the option of the destination machine. So if her MTA is (most
       are) case insensitive for those addresses, she can change the case
       of her name and all other mailers should preserve that
       capitalization change. Humans typing the name tend not to be.

       Many mailers will preserve any "comments" included in an email
       address. RFC822 defines a comment:


comment     =  "(" *(ctext / quoted-pair / comment) ")"
ctext       =  <any CHAR excluding "(", ")", "\" & CR, & including
                linear-white-space>
quoted-pair =  "\" CHAR                     ; may quote any char
linear-white-space =  1*([CRLF] LWSP-char)  ; semantics = SPACE
                                            ; CRLF => folding

        CHAR
                7-bit character

        LWSP
                linear whitespace: TAB and SPACE

        CR
                carriage return, an ASCII control character

        LF
                line feed, an ASCII control character

       This is not very legible to the typical human. What it means is a
       comment may contain any character, but some -- "(" ")" "\" CR --
       must be "backslash escaped". That just means put a backslash (it
       is "\" and not "/") in front of characters whose special meanings
       that need to be escaped.

       Mostly. There is also that bit that comments may contain other
       comments; this will preclude using regular expressions to match
       addresses. Basically this translates to mean that your parentheses
       must match in the normal manner or else should be backslash
       escaped. So some valid comments are


(hi-ya @lice here)

(This is //-\\lice)

(Let's (recurse (and (again (and (again (and (I'm (bored (now))))))))))

(\) whee)

   And some invalid comments would be

(\/\/\/\/\)

()ops)

(Spiff()

   Now, if that were not ugly enough, RFC822 says that there can be
       whitespace or comments by any delimiter. The delimiters are

          ( ) < > @ , ; : \ " . [ ]

       So the following are all legal and equivalent addresses for me:

< eli @ netusa . net >

<eli(jah)@netusa.net>

< eli(Elijah)@netusa(not associated with usa.net).net >

(Elijah) <eli@(dougs-home)netusa.net>

< eli @ (the raw IP for mail (and thus subject to change)) [204.141.0.25] >

< eli @ (a subtler variation on the above) [204.141.25] >

<eli (Pogonatus (latin for <the bearded>))@ (qz (pronounced (queasy) ) \
 .little-neck (I did not want that, but RFC1480 required it) .ny (New \
 F%@!: York) .us (USA) or ) netusa (Located on Long Island) . net> (Elijah)

   Alice will find that a lot of mailers are not RFC822 compliant by
       trying some of those out, especially that last one. Most mailers
       seem happy to accept and preserve addresses like the second one
       from the top, so that may be a good way for Alice to modify her
       address for filtering purposes. "Preserve" does not mean that the
       comment will be in the same place, just that it will be included.

       The URL (uniform resource locator) mailto: scheme employs an
       "RFC822 addr-spec" address in the scheme specific part. According
       to my reading of the relevant RFCs, this means you can use
       comments in mailto: addresses, but the "%", "+", and whitespace
       characters should be "percent escaped". This escaping works by
       having a % followed by the hexadecimal value of the character so

        %
                => %25

        +
                => %2b

        <space>
                => %20

       Note that the "<" and ">" address delimiters should not be used in
       a URL. The URL format itself precludes the need for them.

       Other people disagree with my reading of the RFCs on this issue.
       They think comments are not allowed at all in the mailto: scheme.
       And it is true that some of the more obscure web browsers
       incorrectly percent escape parentheses, thus destroying the
       address. I think all versions of Netscape, Explorer, Mosaic, and
       Lynx get it right, but use with caution.
                    ___________________________________

Appendix
                                 __________

   General format of a From: header

   Here are the three generally accepted formats for a From: line. These
   are actually just special cases of RFC 822 addresses appearing after
   the string "From: ". RFC 1036 specifies that only one of these
   variations should be used for news. I have tried other variations in
   mail and seen weird things happen when people with combined mail and
   news readers try to reply.


From: [e-mail] (Alice)
From: Alice <[e-mail]>
From: [e-mail]

   localpart will be your username+box; the fully qualified domain name
   is the full name of a machine you receive mail at; the name field has
   whatever "full name" you want to use. See the other suggestions
   question for more information on RFC 822 addresses.
                                 __________

   Filtering

   Well, now that Alice has a means of marking addresses for different
   handling, it is entirely reasonable that she might want some advice on
   how to use the marks effectively. Nancy McGough's Filtering Mail FAQ
   referenced earlier in this FAQ is a good place to start learning about
   filtering tools. I am going to provide some advice here for what to
   filter with. I have a filtering resource page that gives information
   on the filters I use, including a link to an annotated version of my
   procmailrc. The page is at
   <URL:http://www.netusa.net/~eli/filtering.html>

   I have found it very effective to give addresses exposed to Usenet in
   the form of a From: or Reply-To: line the most stringent filtering. I
   use procmail to handle my filtering, and this is the exact recipe I
   have for it (my Usenet posts go out from
   <[e-mail]>):


        :0:
        * ^TOusenet-tag@qz
        * !^Subject:(.Re:|(.*[[({ -](was|Re):))
        IN.junk

   IN.junk is a mbox file I check occasionally for false positives. Maybe
   1-3% of it is false positives, often very easily distinguishable from
   the other stuff by the subject line.

   For those unfamilar with regular expressions (REs), that recipe is
   probably not very clear. Unfortunately REs are quite complicated and
   beyond the scope of this document. Jeffrey Friedl has written a good
   book about them, Mastering Regular Expressions published by O'Reilly
   and Associates. Many other sources cover them in less detail. Check
   your documentation for grep or egrep in particular. Be aware that most
   egreps today are much more sophisticated than the one procmail claims
   to be compatible with.

   In English, here's what that does. All mail sent to an address
   containing the phrase "usenet-tag@qz" which gets delivered to me will
   be tested for compliance with the second rule. The second rule says
   any of that mail which does not have a subject which begins with "Re:"
   or have a subject which anywhere in it contains a "[", "(", "{", " "
   or "-" followed immediately by a "was:" or "Re:" is put into the junk
   pile. The first part of the subject rule matches regular replies to
   posts and so they do not get junked. The second part recognizes the
   standard Usenet convention for changing a subject line, which is to
   put the new subject in front and then leave the old one there
   (sometimes parenthetically) after the word "was:".

   The types of mail this messes up on are those where someone takes the
   time to note the address, and uses it to send new mail later. This
   happens very infrequently in my experience. Tim Pierce and others have
   advocated checking for headers left in by newsreaders when filtering
   mail for Usenet addresses. This is subject to the same problem as my
   technique, but is additionally dependent on people not replying from
   copies found in DejaNews or Altavista and on relying upon newsreaders
   to add headers not specified in any standards document. That second
   bit makes it much too unreliable, in my opinion.

   A note about that recipe: My username is not "usenet" and that is not
   a submailbox for me. With sendmail (at least how I had it configured,
   YMMV with legacy sendmail.cf files) sub-boxing works just the same.
   Other MTAs might not work that way: the box name may get canonicalized
   out of the header. Mailers are not supposed to rewrite these headers,
   but it happens all the time. In any case, Philip Guenther
   <[e-mail]> wrote on the procmail mailing list (to join, send
   subscription requests to
   <[e-mail]>):


Michael Ghens <[e-mail]> writes:
>I missed it, how does the + addressing get passed in
>
>as in [e-mail]


It shows up as $1 in your procmail, which you can then test with
something like:

        ARG = $1

        :0
        * ARG ?? ^^pgp^^
        pgp-folder

        :0
        * ARG ?? ^^cypher-punks^^
        cypher-punks-folder


You can't test $1 directly, thus the assignment to ARG.

   ^^ is a weird procmail-specific regexp anchor. ^ and $ work just as
   well for what we want. (Gory details: ^ and $ match zero width
   conditions near line ends, while ^^ matches zero width conditions near
   string ends, much like \A and \Z in perl.) The main advantage of that
   recipe is $1 is set to the correct subbox even for Bcc'ed stuff when
   procmail is used as the local delivery agent from sendmail. (For
   certain sendmail.cf configurations at least.)

   One can AND test together in a procmail recipe in a number of ways.
   Including a number of separate * tests is one way, but it does not
   allow if-then-else type structures easily. For those { ... } grouping
   can be used. Here is an example for a submailbox named "news"
   employing my subject rule.


        ARG=$1

        # Rules to apply to Usenet responses.
        :0
        * ARG ?? ^news$
        {
          # Where to send stuff missing Re: or was: in the subject
          :0:
          * !^Subject:(.Re:|(.*[[({ -](was|Re):))
          IN.junk

          # Where to send the rest of it.
          :0:
          IN.good
        }
                           _____________________

   A word on address types

   In the simple mail transport protocol (SMTP) there are two types of
   sender address and two types of recipient address. This can be used
   for all sorts of obfuscation, and often is. The types are,
   respectively, the envelope addresses and the header addresses.

   Within the protocol, the difference between the two is that envelope
   addresses are specified with protocol commands and header addresses
   are specified as part of the mail data. There need not be any
   correlation between a From: or To: in the headers and those from the
   envelope. Most mailer delivery agents add a Return-Path: header that
   has the envelope from address when delivering mail. Some delivery
   agents add the envelope to address to a Received: header, but they do
   not do it when there is more than one recipient at a site. If either
   of the header to or from addresses are missing they will be added as
   an Apparently-To: or Apparently-From: using the envelope addresses.

   Why the two different types? Well it turns out that this is really
   useful for forwarding mail, especially for mailing lists. Mail sent to
   a mailing list will be delivered with the envelope from set to the
   list, the envelope to set to each member of the list, the header from
   set to the sender of the message, and the header to set to the list.
   Note that this is a convention, not a requirement. It makes a lot of
   sense for a mailing list, if you think about it. Similar behavior is
   used for blind carbon copied (BCC) mail.

   There is the problem however that people wishing to send bulk email
   (legitimately or not) can just set up a mailing list and it all gets
   delivered to the recipient without them knowing what address was used.
   The implications of this on sub-box filtering should be obvious.

   Unless your mail delivery agent does your filtering, all mail to
   desired mailing lists must be pre-filtered out and then all other
   Bcc'ed mail must be considered suspect. Here is a sample procmailrc
   for Alice if she were subscribed to several lists I read:


# Process mail not specifically addressed to alice@bobs-home
:0
* !^TOalice@bobs-home
{
  # Sent by or to the quickcam driver developer list, a generic list
  # example. Return-Path:, assuming your mailer adds it, is another
  # good generic header to filter on. Some mailing lists are run by
  # a special list user and so all lists from that machine will have
  # the same Return-Path:. This will break things in some situations.
  :0:
  * ^(Sender|To):.*quickcam-drivers
  IN.quickcam-list

  # Mail from the lynx developer's list -or- a Bcc'ed personal reply
  # to mail from it. This is a filtering (dis)advantage of lists that
  # modify the subject.
  :0:
  * ^Subject:.*LYNX-DEV
  IN.lynx-list

  # From the procmail list. All smartlist mailing lists have a handy
  # X-Loop header to filter on.
  :0:
  * ^X-Loop: [e-mail]
  IN.procmail-list

  # Remaining mail is either a Bcc or an unknown mailing list.
  :0:
  IN.bcc-suspect
}

   With MMDF filtering or procmail as her local delivery agent and some
   sendmail.cf magic, Alice can filter on the envelope address. For
   procmail see the example above on the usage of $1. For MMDF she can
   add to her .maildelivery file a line like:


addr = | A "/path/to/procmail -a $(address) -d alice"

   This will enable procmail filtering on the envelope as above. Read the
   man page for maildelivery(5) for more information on a MMDF
   .maildelivery file.
                           _____________________

   Comprehensive plan for a new account

   This is a plan of action Alice, mail id alice at bobs-home.com could
   use. Bobs-home has sendmail configured to use + addresses, but not to
   use procmail as a delivery agent. (So procmail cannot know the
   envelope address.)

   Here is what she is going to do: bounce all mail addressed to
   "alice@bobs-home", accept mail addressed to "alice+mail@bobs-home",
   and filter mail to "alice+news@bobs-home". Then set the reply to for
   all of her mail to "[e-mail]" and send all of her
   posts from "[e-mail]". This is hard to do on an old
   account, because too many people know the regular address. With a new
   account she can prevent them from ever getting into the habit of using
   it.

   She starts off by creating this .forward file to invoke procmail on
   all of her mail. The quotes used are an important part of this.


"|IFS=' '&&exec /usr/local/bin/procmail -f-||exit 75 #alice"

   Here is a procmailrc that should do the filtering part. As yet this is
   UNTESTED. The DEFAULT variable should be defined by procmail to her
   system mailbox, setting it herself won't hurt, assuming she gets it
   right.


# The system mailboxes at bobs-home are in /var/spool/mail/.
DEFAULT=/var/spool/mail/alice

# Where non-DEFAULT mailboxes live; Mutt uses $HOME/Mail/ by default.
# Destination files in recipes will be relative to this unless they
# start with a '/'. $HOME is set already.
MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail

# Where to log.
LOGFILE=$HOME/.procmaillog

# Set the shell, just to make sure it's /bin/sh
SHELL=/bin/sh

# Three line summary log for each piece of mail.
LOGABSTRACT=yes

# Addtionally, log the To: header. formail comes with procmail.
LOG=`formail -X To:`"
"

# Accept real mail
:0:
* ^TOalice\+mail@bobs-home
$DEFAULT

# Accept mailer daemon mail
:0:
* ^FROM_MAILER
$DEFAULT

# Filter news replies
# (The plus character in the address is "magical" in REs
#  and needs to be protected with a backslash)
:0
* ^TOalice\+news@bobs-home
{
        # Bad subject: not in reply form
        :0:
        * !^Subject:(.Re:|(.*[[({ -](was|Re):))
        IN.junk

        # Reply to an article
        :0:
        $DEFAULT
}

# Bounce remainder, saving a copy in junk, just in case. The EXITCODE is
# the value procmail will return to sendmail on exit. 67 is a sendmail
# specific value that will cause a bounce message to be sent.
EXITCODE=67
:0:
IN.junk

   Alice uses trn to read and post news, so she sets the NEWSHEADER and
   MAILHEADER environment variables. sh/ksh/bash/zsh commands that go
   into a .profile for this are:


# This is the default value of NEWSHEADER in 3.6 with a from line prepended.
NEWSHEADER='From: Alice <[e-mail]>
%(%[followup-to]=^$?:%(%[followup-to]=^%n$?:X-ORIGINAL-NEWSGROUPS: %n
))Newsgroups: %(%F=^$?%C:%F)
Subject: %(%S=^$?%"\n\nSubject: ":Re: %S)
Summary:
Expires:
%(%R=^$?:References: %R
)Sender:
Followup-To:
%(%{REPLYTO}=^$?:Reply-To: %{REPLYTO}
)Distribution: %(%i=^$?%"Distribution: ":%D)
Organization: %o
Keywords: %[keywords]
Cc: \n\n'

# This is the default value of MAILHEADER in 3.6 with a from line prepended.
MAILHEADER='From: Alice <[e-mail]>
To: %t
Subject: %(%i=^$?:Re: %S
%(%{REPLYTO}=^$?:Reply-To: %{REPLYTO}
)Newsgroups: %n
In-Reply-To: %i)
%(%[references]=^$?:References: %[references]
)Organization: %o
Cc:
Bcc: \n\n'

export NEWSHEADER MAILHEADER

   This will cause the Originator: header to be set to
   "[e-mail]", but since she is bouncing that address it
   shouldn't matter too much. If she really wanted to clean that up, she
   could use a different inews and Pnews. (Stuff that is posted and
   mailed using the Cc: header on a post will appear to be from the
   "alice+news" address.)

   Alice uses mutt to read and reply to mail, so she creates a .muttrc
   with the following line it it:


my_hdr From: Alice <[e-mail]>

   When Alice wants to subscribe to mailing lists she will have to adjust
   her .procmailrc accordingly. She also can't get Bcc'ed mail as sent by
   most programs. As a last comment let me state that there is nothing
   inherently special about her using "+mail" and "+news" as the box
   names, it was just convient.
                           _____________________

   Verifying Email Addresses

   An often asked question in many newsgroups is "How can I verify an
   email address?" Sometimes people mean that they want to verify
   deliverability, sometimes they wish to verify valid syntax. The
   reasons for doing this vary from not wanting to accept invalid
   addresses in databases to wanting to discard all mail from invalid
   addresses. Neither verification variant is probably worth the effort.
   A sanity check might be worthwhile for catching obvious problems, but
   that is about it.

   Some of the techniques and pitfalls of the deliverability variant
   include:

     * Technique: "Verify that the destination machine name is real"

       Pitfalls: Between mailer exchange (MX records) redirections and
       wildcarded mailer exchanges for whole domains, a real address
       might be incorrectly flagged as bad. Combine that with temporary
       domain name service (DNS) and other transient problems that crop
       up and the complexity becomes apparent. Then you have to worry
       about routed addresses which have multiple hostnames to worry
       about, at least one of them probably not Internet accessible. UUCP
       bang ("!") paths are probably the best known variety of these.

     * Technique: "Use the SMTP VRFY command"

       Pitfalls: The most common pitfall with this is that most modern
       MTAs can be configured to not give out useful information in
       response to this or to the related EXPN command. Gateways,
       remailers, and various transient problems will further frustrate
       the would-be VRFYer.

     * Technique: "Attempt to mail to the address and check for a bounce"
       This sometimes includes actually sending mail, and sometimes just
       presenting a mail envelope to the mail server.

       Pitfalls: Some addresses never bounce mail even if it is an
       invalid address. Some addresses send faked bounces to some mail
       while still saving it for a recipient to read. Sometimes MTAs send
       informational transient error bounce messages to indicate the mail
       is spooled and delivery will be reattempted. These do not provide
       any information about validity of the address.

     * Technique: "Send mail to the address asking for a reply"

       Pitfalls: Getting a reply from this is the only way to be sure
       that an address was valid at the time you sent the mail. Since
       then, of course, the address could have become invalid. Not
       getting a reply doesn't help too much. Getting a bounce may help.

   The "check for bounce" tests are probably the best sanity check for
   address deliverability. Most addresses that bounce are invalid, most
   that don't are valid.

   The other variant, checking for valid syntax in an address, is doable,
   even when isolated from a network. It is not done easily however. Look
   at some of the valid address examples I gave earlier in this FAQ. The
   most pathological of the lot are probably these two:


< eli @ [ 204 . 141 . 25 ] >

<eli (Pogonatus (latin for <the bearded>))@ (qz (pronounced (queasy) ) \
 .little-neck (I did not want that, but RFC1480 required it) .ny (New \
 F%@!: York) .us (USA) or ) netusa (Located on Long Island) . net> (Elijah)

   The first one uses a domain literal, hence the [brackets]. Many people
   seem to think that it is fine to just use raw IP addresses in the
   route specification portion of an address. This is not true. Some
   mailers may accept it, but the proper notation uses brackets. Even
   when people do know that, they don't often know that in dot quad
   notation the third quad or both the second and third quads may be
   dropped if they are zeros. So "[127.1]" is equivalent to "[127.0.0.1]"
   and "[204.141.25]" is equivalent to "[204.141.0.25]".

   The second example is designed to break all regexps I have seen to
   check for a valid RFC 822 address. Jeffrey Friedl designed the most
   comprehensive one I have seen as an example for his book Mastering
   Regular Expressions. But because regular expressions may not match
   arbitrary paired nestings, e.g. properly matched parentheses, his
   effort was only designed to match two deep nesting. For other efforts
   to recognize addresses, that example includes six characters special
   in email addresses ( < > % @ ! : ) inside of comments in it. Not to
   mention all that whitespace, since it's allowed and improves
   readibility so much. :^)

   The two practical options are to write a full RFC 822 address parser
   or to "destructively" test a copy of the address. The first is not too
   difficult, but there are about three pages of BNF in RFC822 so it
   would probably take at least an afternoon's time to write. The second
   involves making a temporary copy of the address and then iteratively
   removing comments and other trouble- some things with say a regexp,
   and then feeding it to Friedl's verifier. Here's some perl code that
   should work for such a destructive preprocessor:


$copy = $address_to_test;

        $copy =~ s:\\.:a:g          ;    # replace \quoted stuff
        $copy =~ s:\\\n::gs         ;    # unfold lines
        $copy =~ s:"[^"]*":b:g      ;    # replace "quoted" stuff
while ( $copy =~ s:\([^()]*\)::g ) {;}   # (remove ((all) comments))

   The while loop removes nested comments one layer at a time. Friedl's
   code to check the address is available from his web pages:
   <URL:http://enterprise.ic.gc.ca/~jfriedl/regex/code.html>. It is about
   5k. If the copy is a syntactically valid address, then the original
   was as well.

   For a reasonable sanity check after my destructive rewriting, try
   this.


        $copy =~ s:\s+::g ;      # suppress whitespace

$lft = ($copy =~ y:<:<: ); # count <s
$rgt = ($copy =~ y:>:>: ); # count >s

   if (( $rgt != $lft ) || ( $lft < 0 ) || ( $lft > 1 )) {
                print "Address has invalid encapsulation\n";
}
else {
        # extract from encapsulation, if any
        $copy =~ s:.*<([^>]*)>.*:$1: ;

   if ( $copy =~ m:\@\.|\.\.|\.$: ) {
                print "Address has invalid dot placement\n";
}
elsif ( $copy =~ m:\@.*\@|^\@|\@$: ) {
                # There are legal addresses this will reject, but they
                # are mind-numbingly rare in practice. The most common
                # form is illustrated in this routed address for me:
                # <@alpha.netusa.net:[e-mail]>
                print "Address has dubious \@ usage\n";
}
elsif(!($copy =~ y:@:@:)) {
                print "Address does not have an at sign\n";
}
elsif(!($copy =~ y:.:.:)) {
                print "Address does not have a dot\n";
}
else {          print "Address is probably good.\n";  }

}

   People often try to make other tests, many of them ill-advised. One
   common one is testing for a known top level domain (TLD). There are a
   lot of these, so doing it right involves a lot of tests or a very
   large and probably slow regexp. And that ignores the fact that new
   ones get added every now and then. As I write this there is the case
   of Zaire. Until recently it was ".zr", but now that Laurent Kabila has
   forced Mobutu Sese Seko out, the country has been renamed the
   Democratic Republic of Congo. It is not unreasonable to expect that a
   new TLD might be added for it.

   Another common but unreliable test is checking for spaces. Besides the
   case I have often illustrated of whitespace being allowed around the
   delimiting characters, it is legitimate to have spaces in the local
   part of an address. Try sending mail to my
   "echo request"@qz.little-neck.ny.us address. Don't worry about the
   subject, but put just the word "ping" in the body. This toy will reply
   from the address it receives your mail from. Thus you can see if your
   mailer is breaking things, such as sending the mail to "request@qz"
   instead.
     _________________________________________________________________

   Comments on this FAQ? Send me mail.