PMDF System Manager's Guide

This section presents a discussion of the operation of domain rewriting rules: how an address is parsed and then transformed via rewrite rules. This section touches briefly on the syntax of rewrite rules as such syntax relates to example addresses, but for full details on rewrite rule syntax, see Section 2.2.4 and Section 2.2.5 below.

There are four steps in the application of the domain rewriting rules to a given address:

1. The first host or domain specification is extracted from the address. (Note that an address may specify more than one host or domain name as is the case with the address jdoe%vax1@example.com.)
2. After extracting the first host or domain name specification, the rewrite rules are scanned for a matching rewrite rule. That is, a search is conducted for a rewrite rule whose pattern portion matches the extracted host/domain name.
3. Once a matching rewrite rule is found, the address is rewritten according to the template portion of that rule. The template also specifies the name of a routing system to which messages to this address should be routed.⁷
4. The routing system name is then compared with the host names associated with each channel. If a match is found, then the message is enqueued to that channel; otherwise, the rewriting process is considered to have failed. If the matching channel is the local channel, then some additional rewriting of the address may occur.

These four steps are described in detail in the following subsections. There are also special template formats which allow for variations in these four steps.