Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!woods
From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: sigh (was Re: Short-circuiting a route)
Message-ID: <3648@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 7 Jul 89 23:29:41 GMT
References: <1062@aber-cs.UUCP> <59767@uunet.UU.NET>
Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods)
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 16

In article <59767@uunet.UU.NET> rick@uunet.UU.NET (Rick Adams) writes:
>> In article <656@kl-cs.UUCP> jonathan@cs.keele.ac.uk (Jonathan Knight) writes:
>>     route mail better than the people who started the mail off.
>
>I'm not arguing in favor of rerouting, but  I can't conceive of
>even a tiny fraction of mail be routed optimally to begin with.

The real problem is that in the interest of routing mail "better", it
sometimes gets routed "wrong" (where I define "wrong" as "won't get there
after rerouting when it would have before"). Do we want mail routing to
be optimal or correct? I prefer to err on the side of correctness, so I
don't reroute explicitly-specified bang paths. At least that way, if the
path turns out to be wrong, it's SEP (Someone Else's Problem) and it
won't be MY fault that the mail didn't get there.

--Greg