76 Mail so mail is delivered into /usr/spool/mail/alan (or whatever). So if you really don’t want to learn how to read mail on a Unix, you have to put a personal entry in the aliases file. I guess the .forward file in your home directory is just a mechanism to make the behavior of the Unix mailer more unpredictable. I wonder what it does if the file server that contains the aliases file is down? Not Following Protocol Every society has rules to prevent chaos and to promote the general wel- fare. Just as a neighborhood of people sharing a street might be composed of people who came from Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America, a neighborhood of computers sharing a network cable often come from dis- parate places and speak disparate languages. Just as those people who share the street make up a common language for communication, the computers are supposed to follow a common language, called a protocol, for commu- nication. This strategy generally works until either a jerk moves onto the block or a Unix machine is let onto the network. Neither the jerk nor Unix follows the rules. Both turn over trash cans, play the stereo too loudly, make life miser- able for everyone else, and attract wimpy sycophants who bolster their lack of power by associating with the bully. We wish that we were exaggerating, but we’re not. There are published protocols. You can look them up in the computer equivalent of city hall— the RFCs. Then you can use Unix and verify lossage caused by Unix’s unwillingness to follow protocol. For example, an antisocial and illegal behavior of sendmail is to send mail to the wrong return address. Let’s say that you send a real letter via the U.S. Postal Service that has your return address on it, but that you mailed it from the mailbox down the street, or you gave it to a friend to mail for you. Let’s suppose further that the recipient marks “Return to sender” on the letter. An intelligent system would return the letter to the return address an unin- telligent system would return the letter to where it was mailed from, such as to the mailbox down the street or to your friend. That system mimicking a moldy avocado is, of course, Unix, but the real story is a little more complicated because you can ask your mail program to do tasks you could never ask of your mailman. For example, when responding to an electronic letter, you don’t have to mail the return enve-

From: MAILER-DAEMON@berkeley.edu 77 lope yourself the computer does it for you. Computers, being the nitpick- ers with elephantine memories that they are, keep track not only of who a response should be sent to (the return address, called in computer parlance the “Reply-to:” field), but where it was mailed from (kept in the “From:” field). The computer rules clearly state that to respond to an electronic mes- sage one uses the “Reply-to” address, not the “From” address. Many ver- sions of Unix flaunt this rule, wrecking havoc on the unsuspecting. Those who religiously believe in Unix think it does the right thing, misassigning blame for its bad behavior to working software, much as Detroit blames Japan when Detroit’s cars can’t compete. For example, consider this sequence of events when Devon McCullough complained to one of the subscribers of the electronic mailing list called PAGANISM4 that the subscriber had sent a posting to the e-mail address PAGANISM-REQUEST@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU and not to the address PAGANISM@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU: From: Devon Sean McCullough devon@ghoti.lcs.mit.edu To: PAGANISM Digest Subscriber This message was sent to PAGANISM-REQUEST, not PAGAN- ISM. Either you or your ‘r’ key screwed up here. Or else the digest is screwed up. Anyway, you could try sending it again. —Devon The clueless weenie sent back the following message to Devon, complain- ing that the fault lied not with himself or sendmail, but with the PAGAN- ISM digest itself: Date: Sun, 27 Jan 91 11:28:11 PST From: Paganism Digest Subscriber To: Devon Sean McCullough devon@ghoti.lcs.mit.edu From my perspective, the digest is at fault. Berkeley Unix Mail is what I use, and it ignores the ‘Reply-to:’ line, using the ‘From:’ line instead. So the only way for me to get the correct address is to either back-space over the dash and type the @ etc in, or save it somewhere and go thru some contortions to link the edited file to the old echoed address. Why make me go to all that trouble? This is the main reason that I rarely post to the PAGANISM digest at MIT. The interpretation of which is all too easy to understand: 4Which has little relation to UNIX-HATERS.