Handling Specialty Addresses
A whole book is dedicated to the myriad forms of addressing that might face a site administrator: !%@:: A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing & Networks, by Donnalyn Frey and Rick Adams (O’Reilly). We won’t duplicate that work here. Rather, we point out that most such addresses are handled nicely by existing configuration files. Consider the format of a DECnet address:
host::user
The best approach to handling such an address in the
canonify rule
set 3 is to convert it into the Internet
user@host.domain form:
R $+ :: $+ $@ $2 @ $1.decnet
Here, we reverse the host and user and put them into Internet form.
The .decnet can
later be used by the parse rule set 0 to select an
appropriate delivery agent.
This is a simple example of a special address problem from the many that can develop. In addition to DECnet, for example, your site might have to deal with Xerox Grapevine addresses, X.400 addresses, or UUCP addresses. The best way to handle such addresses is to copy what others have done.
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