*BSD News Article 41930


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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!agate!darkstar.UCSC.EDU!cats.ucsc.edu!haynes
From: haynes@cats.ucsc.edu (James H. Haynes)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Annoying Property of UCB Mail Program
Date: 1 Feb 1995 18:31:25 GMT
Organization: University of California, Santa Cruz
Lines: 12
Message-ID: <3gok1t$31e@darkstar.UCSC.EDU>
NNTP-Posting-Host: hobbes.ucsc.edu


mail (UCB version) seems to be the most popular mail program here.  As
postmaster I get tons of lost mail from beginning users who have tried to
say 'mail -f <something>' at the & prompt.  I wish somebody would fix
the mail program to at least detect the '-' when somebody does that
and tell the user it won't work.

While we're at it, another cause of much postmaster mail from novice users
comes from those who say      mail user @ host . dom . ain
Now it's hard to detect all cases of that kind of crock, but a more
postmaster-friendly version of the program might at least detect the
@-sign and dot isolated by white space and clue the user.