Query: Sadhu's e-mail

Fri May 19 22:56:26 UTC 1995

Namaste:

OK.  Will do.  So sorry for the inconvenience!  Pardon me for boring
others, but allow me to exlain.

You mention that you are using a unix system.  Normally any mail
client, such as mush, mailx, /bin/mail, pine, etc, will process the
bang correctly, if you are composing the mail from within the client
program.  But perhaps you are trying to send mail directly from the
shell?  In that case, simply preface the bang with a backslash and that
will keep your shell from trying to interpret it.

eg:
	% mail -s "test message" pslvax\!sadhu at ucsd.edu

On the other hand, if it is your mail agent, or the mail agent on any
intermediate machine between yours and ours, that will not help.

Yes, it is unfortunate that bang addressing is not universally
processed correctly.  It often depends upon how the local unix systems
administrator has configured sendmail or whatever mail agent they may
be using.  Newer sites may be less familiar with it?

We are a UUCP node off the net, rather than a direct net site.  The
bang notation is a long established form for uucp connections, which
used to be more prevalent than direct net (PPP, SLIP, TCP/IP,..)
connections.  In my approximately 13 years of using this email address,
I have found the bang notation to be the best variation.  In other
words, it is acceptable to more mail systems than any other variation
I've tried.  (Save machines in England, which seem to have the most
trouble.)

The usual problem is that some mail systems try to be "helpful" by
_processing_ the bang notation, but, they manage instead to mangle it
up.  So, a few people do have trouble, in which case, I recommend this
alternative using % notation:

	sadhu%pslvax.uucp at ucsd.edu

If that doesn't work, email to my mci address is autoforwarded to me.
There is a greater delay, but the address is:

	0003254561 at mcimail.com

Om Namasivaya
sadhu