Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!woods From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail Subject: Re: Re^2: Short-circuiting a route Message-ID: <3569@ncar.ucar.edu> Date: 28 Jun 89 17:07:30 GMT References: <562@daitc.daitc.mil> <89Jun28.104844edt.10373@neat.ai.toronto.edu> Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO Lines: 20 The problem with short-circuiting bang paths is that YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT EVERYONE IS DOING, and there may be a very good reason why the path is the way it is. For example, if you look up the MX record for "*.fidonet.org", which is a valid, registered domain, you will see that it points at my machine handies.ucar.edu. We, however, do not have a direct connection to everyone in fidonet.org. No one on the Internet does. So what do I do? I generate a BANG PATH. This means that addresses that look like user@f###.n###.z#.fidonet.org get sent to handies, which converts them into a form like path!to!appropriate!fidogateway!f###.n###.z#.fidonet.org!user. Now, take a guess what happens if some too smart site tries to short-circuit the bang path? Can you say infinite loop? In fact, what was once a trivial service to provide for the Fidonet folks is now becoming a real pain, precisely because some sites insist on short-circuiting bang paths. I have to find out which sites these are (always the hard way) and then mark them DEAD in my pathalias database. Please, DON'T reroute explicitly-specified paths!! I am sure that fidonet.org is not the only valid domain that does something like this. Thanks. --Greg