Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.ai.toronto.edu!lamy
From: lamy@ai.utoronto.ca (Jean-Francois Lamy)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re^2: Short-circuiting a route
Message-ID: <89Jun28.104844edt.10373@neat.ai.toronto.edu>
Date: 28 Jun 89 14:48:27 GMT
References: <562@daitc.daitc.mil> <KARL.89Jun28094504@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Lines: 16

Karl's solution is purely syntactic; in such a case short-circuiting
uucp1!uucp2!uucp3!domain.name!user into domain.name!user is not necessarily a
good idea if domain.name happens to be a UUCP-only site... You may be closer
to domain.name than the official forwarder, and you leave users no way to
route around broken forwarders (such things do happen).  A solution to this
problem would likely have to be far more involved (and I'm ignoring things
like the fact that it is often the case that uucp3 will know how to rewrite
headers to please domain.name, whereas you may end up generating addresses
that they won't like one bit).

To reiterate: a domain name does not imply direct internet connectivity.  The
canadian domain, .Ca, contains machines that are exclusively on Bitnet (oups,
NetNorth/CardPunchNet :-), CDNNET (X.400), UUCP and the Internet.

Jean-Francois Lamy               lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy
AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4