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Re: Question on how bang-paths worked from the old days

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It appears that John Goerzen  <jgoerzen@complete.org> said:
>The questions are two:
>
>1) Exactly how did mail routing work, and what/why added extra From/>From lines to messages?

The bang path really was a path, and if you sent mail to a!b!c!bob it would send
the message to host a with address b!c!bob, it'd then send it to host b with address c!bob, etc.

Later on we had the uucp mapping project so you'd send mail to c!bob and your mail server would
look up c in the map, prepend the path, and send it on its way.

>2) Was there any sane "reply" function in mail software, and if so, how would it compute a reply path?

Once we had the maps, yes, before that, not without hand editing the address.

>sending a message to host1!host2!host3!user, it would run
>
>uux ... host1!rmail host2!host3!user
>
>(I think?)  Is that correct?

Yes.

>So why would it not have done:
>
>uux .... host1!host2!host3!rmail user
>
>instead, using UUCP routing to get all the way to the destination?  Perhaps these added From lines have part of the answer (being needed to compute a Return-Path?)

UUCP routing?  There was and is no such thing.  The uux command only knows how to send 
a command and an input file one hop.

That's why we needed the mapping project to put source routes in the rmail commands.

>And, an any case, what program along the way was adding the extra From or >From lines?  

The Unix mail program prepended the From line when it stored the
message in the recipient mailbox. (Still does, in fact.) It is the
delimiter between messages. 

If that sounds like a really lame idea that someone might have
invented in two seconds in the 1970s, yup.

By the way, FreeBSD and probably other unix-ish systems still come with uucp and uux.
If you want to experiment, you can try them out.

R's,
John, ima!johnl
-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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Question on how bang-paths worked from the old days John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> - 2021-08-01 20:52 -0700
  Re: Question on how bang-paths worked from the old days John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> - 2021-08-02 20:23 +0000
    Re: Question on how bang-paths worked from the old days John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> - 2021-08-02 14:11 -0700
      Re: Question on how bang-paths worked from the old days Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> - 2021-08-02 17:44 -0600
    Re: Question on how bang-paths worked from the old days Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> - 2021-08-02 17:24 -0600
      Re: Question on how bang-paths worked from the old days John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> - 2021-08-03 02:24 +0000
        Re: Question on how bang-paths worked from the old days Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> - 2021-08-02 22:35 -0600
          Re: Question on how bang-paths worked from the old days Crypto God <CryptoGod@china.com> - 2021-10-09 05:00 +0000
            Re: Question on how bang-paths worked from the old days Avon Kerr <avon@bbs.nz.invalid> - 2021-10-13 22:02 +1300
            Re: Question on how bang-paths worked from the old days <joe@example.invalid> - 2022-02-27 10:48 +0000

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