4 Mail Don’t Talk to Me, I’m Not a Typewriter! Not having sendmail is like not having VD. —Ron Heiby Former moderator, comp.newprod Date: Thu, 26 Mar 92 21:40:13 -0800 From: Alan Borning borning@cs.washington.edu To: UNIX-HATERS Subject: Deferred: Not a typewriter When I try to send mail to someone on a Unix system that is down (not an uncommon occurrence), sometimes the mailer gives a totally incomprehensible error indication, viz.: Mail Queue (1 request) --QID-- --Size-- -----Q-Time----- --------Sender/Recipient-------- AA12729 166 Thu Mar 26 15:43 borning (Deferred: Not a typewriter) bnfb@csr.uvic.ca What on earth does this mean? Of course a Unix system isn’t a type- writer! If it were, it would be up more often (with a minor loss in functionality).

62 Mail Sendmail: The Vietnam of Berkeley Unix Before Unix, electronic mail simply worked. The administrators at differ- ent network sites agreed on a protocol for sending and receiving mail, and then wrote programs that followed the protocol. Locally, they created sim- ple and intuitive systems for managing mailing lists and mail aliases. Seri- ously: how hard can it be to parse an address, resolve aliases, and either send out or deliver a piece of mail? Quite hard, actually, if your operating system happens to be Unix. Date: Wed, 15 May 1991 14:08-0400 From: Christopher Stacy CStacy@stony-brook.scrc.symbolics.com To: UNIX-HATERS Subject: harder!faster!deeper!unix Remember when things like netmail used to work? With UNIX, peo- ple really don’t expect things to work anymore. I mean, things sorta work, most of the time, and that’s good enough, isn’t it? What’s wrong with a little unreliability with mail? So what if you can’t reply to messages? So what if they get dropped on the floor? The other day, I tried talking to a postmaster at a site running send- mail. You see, whenever I sent mail to people at his site, the headers of the replies I got back from his site came out mangled, and I couldn’t reply to their replies. It looked like maybe the problem was at his end—did he concur? This is what he sent back to me: Date: Mon, 13 May 1991 21:28 EDT From: silv@upton.com (Stephen J. Silver)1 To: mit-eddie!STONY- BROOK.SCRC.Symbolics.COM!CStacy@EDDIE.MIT.EDU 2 Subject: Re: mangled headers No doubt about it. Our system mailer did it. If you got it, fine. If not, how did you know? If you got it, what is wrong? Just does not look nice? I am not a sendmail guru and do not have 1Pseudonym. 2Throughout most of this book, we have edited gross mail headers for clarity. But on this message, we decided to leave this site’s sendmail’s handiwork in all its glory—Eds.