PMDF System Manager's Guide
Previous Next Contents Index

2.3.4.57 Restricted mailbox encoding (restricted, unrestricted)

Some mail systems have great difficulty dealing with the full spectrum of addresses allowed by RFC 822. A particularly common example of this is sendmail-based mailers with incorrect configuration files. Quoted local-parts (or mailbox specifications) are a frequent source of trouble: 


"alonso, king"@naples.example.com
This is such a major source of difficulty that a methodology was laid out in RFC 1137 to work around the problem. The basic approach is to remove quoting from the address and then apply a translation that maps the characters requiring quoting into characters allowed in an atom (see RFC 822 for a definition of an atom as it is used here). For example, the preceeding address would become: 


alonso#m#_king@naples.example.com

The restricted channel keyword tells PMDF that the channel connects to mail systems that require this encoding. PMDF then encodes quoted local-parts in both header and envelope addresses as messages are written to the channel. Incoming addresses on the channel are decoded automatically.

The unrestricted keyword tells PMDF not to perform RFC 1137 encoding and decoding. unrestricted is the default.

Note
The restricted keyword should be applied to the channel that connects to systems unable to accept quoted local-parts. It should not be applied to the channels that actually generate the quoted local-parts! (It is assumed that a channel capable of generating such an address is also capable of handling such an address.)

Previous Next Contents Index