[Info-vax] bizarre SMTP problem

[Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply]

In article <grlpgq$2k2$1 at pcls6.std.com>, moroney at world.std.spaamtrap.com
(Michael Moroney) writes: 

> helbig at astro.multiCLOTHESvax.de (Phillip Helbig---remove CLOTHES to reply) writes:
> 
> >> aka: the + seems to be used as a "," to delimit multiple destinations
> 
> >That's what I guessed.  Is this documented anywhere?
> 
> I'll guess that MAIL uses a DCL parsing routine to parse that To: line.
> In DCL, the "+" works similar to a ",", but they don't always mean the same
> thing.  Some DCL commands treat the "+" as combining the inputs into one,
> but offhand I can't think of any.

FORTRAN.

> So, it's a matter of using the wrong tool for the job, although it wasn't
> "wrong" decades ago when SMTP simply didn't exist, at least not on VMS.
> SMTP address parsing doesn't follow DCL rules.
> 
> VMS desperately needs a new email client.

It wouldn't take that much work to update it so that it would be both 
modern and backwards compatible.  I have VMS MAIL stuff going back 
almost 20 years, and I want to continue to access it.  I also have 
procedures etc which use VMS MAIL.  All that should continue to work.  
There is a standalone MIME utility.  One could integrate that with VMS 
MAIL, or at least with DECwindows MAIL (which might be a good starting 
point since it is more modern than the CLI MAIL yet uses the same 
underlying structures).