[nos-bbs] Changing BIDs

[Michael Fox - N6MEF]

Maiko,

Ugh.  Sorry this is such a mess.  I wish I could help.  

Here's some info that may be useful.

JNOS has the extra complication of needing to comply with SMTP.  So, I
wanted to bring this to your attention just in case the work you are doing
on BIDs/MIDs could change the SMTP behavior.

In SMTP addressing, with the address format "local-part at domain", there are
some specific handling requirements:

RFC 5321, 2.3:  "...the local-part MUST be interpreted and assigned
semantics only by the host specified in the domain part of the address."  

In other words, don't change the case of the local-part unless you are the
destination host.  Now, I suspect that JNOS is rarely used as an SMTP relay
between hosts.  But this would also apply to mail that is created on the
local JNOS to be sent elsewhere.  If the user types upper or mixed case in
the local-part, JNOS needs to preserve that because it may matter to the
destination host.

RFC 5321, 2.4:  "...Verbs and argument values ... are not case sensitive,
with the sole exception in this specification of a mailbox local-part. ...
The local-part of the mailbox MUST BE treated as case sensitive.  Therefore,
SMTP implementations MUST take care to preserve the case of mailbox
local-parts.  In particular, for some hosts, the user 'smith' is different
from the user 'Smith'.  However, exploiting the case sensitivity of mailbox
local-parts impedes interoperability and is discouraged.  Mailbox domains
follow normal DNS rules and are hence not case sensitive."

In other words, for incoming mail to be deposited in a local JNOS mailbox,
you can do what you want.  And currently, for incoming mail destined for
local delivery, JNOS seems to be ignoring the case of the local-part and
lowercasing it when placing it in mailboxes.  And that's fine.  But for mail
that is created in JNOS, or mail that is relayed (again, rare for JNOS), the
local-part case should not be changed from what the user inputs (or what
JNOS receives via relay).  The domain part is not case-sensitive and can be
converted.

Michael
N6MEF



> -----Original Message-----
> From: nos-bbs <nos-bbs-bounces at lists.tapr.org> On Behalf Of Maiko
> Langelaar
> Sent: Monday, July 16, 2018 6:54 AM
> To: TAPR xNOS Mailing List <nos-bbs at lists.tapr.org>
> Subject: Re: [nos-bbs] Changing BIDs
> 
> 
> <humour or lack of>
> 
> Well ... this is unreal ... mailbox parsing lower cases EVERYTHING that
> comes in ... then the code uppercases the proposal only (for checksum
> work) ... so here I am trying to find all the strupr and strlwr calls,
> only to
> find that at the very beginning when any station connects, the mailbox
> parsing itself (the first module to get the incoming data) lower cases all
> of it. This gets more 'interesting' every day ....
> 
>     let's lower case evertyhing, oh wait, then upper case some of it, then
>    lowercase other parts, then let's rebuild the entire proposal, the
> upper
>     case the rebuild, all the while the BID is hidden in there somewheres.
> 
> This is going to take a bit more time, this is scary, all I want to do
> is preserve
> the case of the BID ... I'm actually afraid of destroying the code now :]
> 
> </humour or lack of>
> 
> Maiko