Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!bbn!oliveb!apple!capmkt!brent
From: brent@capmkt.COM (Brent Chapman)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: sigh (was Re: Short-circuiting a route)
Message-ID: <330@capmkt.COM>
Date: 11 Jul 89 19:40:53 GMT
References: <1062@aber-cs.UUCP> <59767@uunet.UU.NET> <3648@ncar.ucar.edu> <3842@phri.UUCP>
Organization: Capital Market Technology, Inc.; Berkeley, CA
Lines: 49

roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:

>In article <3648@ncar.ucar.edu> woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods) writes:
>> 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.

I agree.

>	We don't currently reoute uucp mail here except for some minor
>internal trickery; you can submit a bang path to any of our non-uucp
>machines and they will forward it via SMTP to our uucp gateway.  We run IDA
>sendmail here, which has all the needed hooks to do pathalias database
>lookups in the MTA layer, but I still want to provide the option of letting
>people explicitly route uucp mail if they want.  I was thinking of not
>touching bang paths at all but doing lookups on person@host.UUCP type
>addresses.  Does this seem reasonable?

Very reasonable.  In fact, this is the most reasonable suggestion that I've
seen come out of this discussion.

Part of the problem is that, despite the valiant and praise-worthy efforts
of the UUCP Mapping Project, there's still a lot of bullshit, incomplete,
and incorrect information in the maps.  By the very nature of the way the
maps are maintained and distributed, I don't think they'll ever be able to
deal with problems like "Hey folks, <backbone site who is on the 'best path'
for lots of other sites> is going to be down for a week while we move to a
new machine room", and all the myriad variations of this.

I don't think that routing is bad; I think that RErouting when the user has
given what he _though_ was a source-route is bad.  If I send something to
a!b!c!d!user because I know that site e is going to be down all afternoon
for maintenance, and some so-called "smart" mailer at a reroutes this to
"a!e!d!user" because it "knows" that this is a better route, I'm going to
be _REAL_ pissed off...  On the other hand, if I send something to
"user@d.UUCP", I am _asking_ someone to route it for me, and will take
whatever I can get.

Now, chances are that if it becomes widely available, then 99% of the time
I'll use addresses of the form "user@site.UUCP" and let someone else route
for me, but I don't want to lose the _option_ of explicitly routing something
when I feel it's necessary.


-Brent
--
Brent Chapman					Capital Market Technology, Inc.
Computer Operations Manager			1995 University Ave., Suite 390
brent@capmkt.com				Berkeley, CA  94704
{apple,lll-tis,uunet}!capmkt!brent		Phone:  415/540-6400