Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!bionet!ig!ames!ncar!woods
From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: Short-circuiting a route
Keywords: sendmail, smail, domain names
Message-ID: <3570@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 28 Jun 89 17:18:53 GMT
References: <562@daitc.daitc.mil> <4140@tank.uchicago.edu>
Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods)
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 37

In article <4140@tank.uchicago.edu> matt@oddjob.uchicago.edu (Matt Crawford) writes:
>I think that it is "bad and wrong" for forwarding.host.edu not to take
>the mail out of the internet once and for all, but it was not in my
>power to enforce this opinion. 

  As one of the forwarding.host.edu's that Matt refers to, I must point
out that it is not always POSSIBLE to do as he suggests. Many domains
have MORE THAN ONE connect point to the Internet, and are not fully
connected within themselves. It is a lot of work to ask an Internet host
to maintain a whole database of MX records for a domain which is not
itself directly on the Internet. I do MX forwarding and name service 
for non-Internet domains, but only if they have one host I can UUCP everything 
to, so that I only need *1* MX record for their domain which never changes.
A domain like fidonet.org has DOZENS of connect points on the Internet,
but they themselves don't have access to the Internet so they must depend
on some friendly site to maintain name service for them. These friendly
sites would be a lot less friendly if they had to maintain dozens of
ever-changing MX records. As it is now, all the Fidonet folks have to
do is get their gateway sites to post new UUCP map entries when something
changes. This way, the people benefitting are the ones doing the work.

>A next-best cure would have been for the
>forwarder to use registered.site.com's 1-component UUCP name instead of
>its internet name in the generated bang path.

  This doesn't work either, because one connect point for a domain
may handle multiple subdomains. Without dots in the bang path address there
is no way to specify this.

>But in the absence of such cooperation, what I did was to short-circuit
>only if the first hop was not a known UUCP neighbor.  

  THANKS! I guess I can mark oddjob as undead now? I see nothing wrong with
doing this, because there would be no way for you to deliver the message 
otherwise.

--Greg