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Re: sendmail problems.



On Fri, 6 Sep 1996, Eran wrote:

> Hi all.
> A friend of mine recently had a problem with sending mail. users could send to root and that's all. no user to 
> user or user to root or even root to user mail. he got user unknwon errors.it turned out that the problem was 
> with upper cased usernames. that is the first letter of every user name was in upper case. why is that a 
> problem? or is it something well known that i simply missed?

the standard in unix is all non-caps, but in other systems it may be
all-caps, mixed, or case-insensitive (see VMS, Delphi's propriety
usernames etc.)

VMS mailers sometimes send out a message with the username in all caps, I
can only assume then that sendmail or some other relaying software on the
way deCAPitates it (ouch!), and so it is prosessed as all non-caps, like
the standard seems to be. on the whole, I guess this means mixed caps is
not a good idea for usernames in the unix world, at least not on the
Internet, with standard mailers.

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