[nos-bbs] Sending Mail via wl2k to internet address using Thunderbird

[Peter McCorison]

Maiko and all:

Here in San Juan County, WA, we have four Auxiliary Comms stations 
located on three different islands. We cannot rely on internet to 
communicate among the stations, but can pretty reliably reach a mainland 
RMS station to relay mail to regular internet addresses. All comms are 
radio only; there's no internet at the stations.

We use Thunderbird to send and receive emails among the stations and 
receive emails from internet addresses via winlink. The reason for this 
requirement is that our small populations leave us depending on 
relatively unskilled operators. All this works as expected except 
sending emails via wl2k to ordinary internet addresses.

Sending an email from Thunderbird to a standard internet address 
requires 'SMTP:' in front of the normal address going to wl2k. The 
resulting address is not rfc-822 compliant, so Thunderbird turns the 
SMTP:<user> part of the address into a quoted string. When this is 
forwarded to wl2k, the address is not recognized and the message is dropped.

The upshot is that after receipt by the JNOS SMTP server we need to 
rewrite the actual <To:> address in the email to remove the quotes. All 
of the rewrite facilities in JNOS seem to apply only to the internal 
address used for forwarding and delivery.

Am I missing something here or is this a real problem? I would be happy 
to hear any suggestions or work-arounds.

Might it make sense to simply remove double quotes from addresses at the 
SMTP server threshold? I can't think of a circumstance where they would 
be used in sending mail direct from the BBS.
-- 
73 - Peter, K2SPR