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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!hou3c!steve@ucl-cs.arpa
From: steve@ucl-cs.arpa (Steve Kille)
Newsgroups: net.mail.headers
Subject: Re:  Is someone trying to prove a point?
Message-ID: <284@hou3c.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 17-Feb-84 06:10:03 EST
Article-I.D.: hou3c.284
Posted: Fri Feb 17 06:10:03 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Feb-84 04:49:27 EST
Sender: ka@hou3c.UUCP (Kenneth Almquist)
Lines: 39
To: "Benson I. Margulies" 

As there have been several comments on this, let me explain a little
of what is going on.

The critical system involved is COM, a conferencing system developed by
Jacb Palme in Stockholm.   There are two instantiations of this, which
interact with the Arpanet: one at York, UK (yorkcom) which will send and
receive using UCL as a relay;  and one at QZ, Stockhom, Sweden  (qzcom
/ oden.mailnet), which is a mailnet host using mit-multics  as a relay.
Both UCL and MIT use the '%' notation to hide  non-arpa domains/hosts.

There are some relevant points:
1) COM adds the _____(text123456) which Geoff noted.   The
number refers to the COM entry.

2) COM usernames have spaces.  Palme found that simply quoting
these caused a lot of problems with many Arpa sites (!!).  Thus
he chose to map spaces into underscores.  Unfortuantely, the
software is not perfect, and often lexical separators, as well
as spaces embedded in usernames get mapped.  This may be fixed
at qz, but certainly not at york.

3) When generating reply addresses, the full trace information
associated with the message is used to generate a humongous
source route (which will get worse when a message is repeatedly
answered).  Attempts are then made to eliminate redundant
components.  (As can be seen from the phrasing of this, I
believe it to be an inappropriate approach).

4) There is a bug/configuration problem at Yrokcom, which
can cause cause strange messages to be sent to an address
approximately relating to recipients in the message to: list.
If this is not fixed soon, the York header-people entry
will be removed from the UCL list expansion.

Steve