Here are some problems that users have experienced with the utk-mail11d
gateway:


1.  Long and obnoxious To: headers.

utk-mail11d generates To: lines from the MAIL-11 envelope recipient list.
This is because I cannot trust the To: lines to contain valid addresses.
Two examples come to mind: (1) VMS MAIL users can define logical names as
aliases for valid addresses, and these are not translated in the To: header
that VMS MAIL supplies.  (2) VMS MAIL supports personal mailing lists by
allowing the user to specify @filename as an address.  These cannot be
converted to valid RFC822 addresses because there is no assurance that the
filename is complete (i.e. contains a correct and unambiguous device,
directory, etc.), nor any assurance that it is readable.  Furthermore, the
appearance of an '@' in such an address ensures that many mail handling
programs will be confused even if the '@' is quoted properly.  After
considering elaborate schemes to translate the To: line into something
reasonable, all of which failed to ensure correctness, I decided to concoct
a new To: line from the recipient list.

The result is that sometimes the To: line contains several lines of
recipient addresses, as the result of a mailing list expansion where
several users read their mail on the Internet side of the DECnet-Internet
gateway.  Furthermore, only the addresses in the latter category appear in
the To: line.  The DECnet recipients of the original message will not
receive any replies to such messages.

The best alternative I've found to this approach is to send a seperate copy
of each incoming message to each recipient, so recipients will only see
themselves in the To: line.  Our local solution has been to move
frequently-used mailing lists to the Internet side of things, so the list
expansion is done by sendmail rather than VMS MAIL.  This has reduced the
frequency of such annoyances to a minimum.

[ note that the DEC version gives you the configuration option of letting
  the mail11 To and Cc show through, and putting the mail11 recipient list
  into the X-Mail11-To: header.  we've found that internet users in general
  expect replies into decnet-land to fail, and they would rather see the
  expanded but worthless To and Cc headers.  we get around the @ problem
  by quoting into rfc822 <group> syntax of "mail11:; (@foo.dis)" which is
  readable by a human and a comment to the mailers.  --vixie at decwrl ]


2.  Hairy quoting in From: addresses.

Although utk-mail11d takes great pains to quote From: addresses correctly, 
many other mail handling programs refuse to do so.  In particular, sendmail
strips quotes from envelope addresses (though not from header addresses),
and several mail user agents refuse to send replies to perfectly valid
addresses because of failure to understand escaped quotes in quoted strings.
