-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com> writes:
From: Matthew J Ghio <mg5n+@andrew.cmu.edu>
You send mail to remail+getid@x.edu.
Is this some kind of RFC822 hack? It doesn't work on my system. Mail to hfinney+xyz@shell.portal.com bounces. Are you assuming some special mail address processing has been installed by the administrators of the machines to handle this "+" hack, or is my machine broken in not respecting it?
After referencing my copy of RFC 822, it doesn't seem (after a quick glance) to allow for user+misc@foo.bar.edu -- I'll have to check more carefully tomorrow. In any case, I (and I assume Mr. Ghio) was introduced to the "+" symantic by the Andrew Message System. The "+" is used as a delimiter for sub-mailboxes for each mail address. Thus, Mr. Ghio is capable of having the mailbox "mg5n+", "mg5n+faq" or "mg5n+biff". They all get delivered to the same person, but Mr. Ghio can set up the "+biff" mailbox to re-distribute to all of USENET, after "BIFFing" up the post. Or he can have "+faq" mail back to you the faq you have requested. You can also have it automatically file away (read: kill or not!) your mail based on address. When I was the comp.os.mach faq maintainer, I had the mail to jb3o+mach@andrew.cmu.edu go to a special mailbox which I read only comp.os.mach faq mail from. The Filtering Language for Andrew MEssage System (FLAMES) is a lisp-like language which allows you (the user) to write various macros for mail-refiling. In any case, it does require some hacking to your SMTP server to get it to accept user+misc@domain style mail. (Basically, a rule which recognizes the string "user" as the mailbox to deliver to, ignoring the "+misc" part.) Once it does accept it, then your user agent can deal with what to do with the "+misc" part. Of course, the precludes the remailers from running on machines which the remailer operator does not have root on (or it requries us to use something other than port 25 for running our servers...). But, in order to maintain the integrity of the log files (by insuring that there are not any), a remailer operator needs to have root permissions anyhow... By the way, Matthew, please drop me a copy of the source code... I've made /afs/andrew.cmu.edu/usr/jb3o/remailer readable and writable by you. Jon Boone | PSC Networking | boone@psc.edu | (412) 268-6959 | PGP Key # B75699 PGP Public Key fingerprint = 23 59 EC 91 47 A6 E3 92 9E A8 96 6A D9 27 C9 6C -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.3a iQCVAgUBLWAefISAMUrxt1aZAQHAvQP/T9/38Hr17EaatvaJ6ZV/tLTYgra0Hwcs MmI6A++JvcWyaVvvI8j2ZbOSUYTlKSax6TrCwixNf0RzKodxHBAh3Fyi0yWIpN0s Xvka2O24eBfF/23GkcKxjxGohug4UlkfaASrDk40bZV7EgXjJ5bfTB0ze2Z/KTGR +2jrV0yzZPs= =4E22 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- #