Path: utzoo!attcan!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: <3696@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 13 Jul 89 17:59:44 GMT
References: <1062@aber-cs.UUCP> <59767@uunet.UU.NET> <3648@ncar.ucar.edu> <3842@phri.UUCP> <330@capmkt.COM> <Jul.12.10.54.13.1989.18547@NET.BIO.NET> <14467@bfmny0.UUCP>
Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods)
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 22

In article <14467@bfmny0.UUCP> tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes:
> * If I am site X, and site Y is a direct neighbor of mine whom I poll
>   daily or better (maybe better than anyone else if it's worse than daily),
>   but I see a piece of incoming mail of the form a!b!X!c!d!e!Y!f!g,
>   then it's reasonable for me to reroute it as a!b!X!Y!f!g.

  No, it isn't. You can't know for sure that Y isn't an internal site of
an organization to which "e" is a gateway. In other words, you can't know
for sure that the Y you speak to is the same Y as the one intended.

> * If my link to site Y is sick, then I ought to respect the longer path.

  This means everyone else has to trust you to change your mail configuration
whenever your link gets sick.

> * If no site in the bang path is a direct neighbor of mine, then I ought
>   to consult pathalias for the link to the site named rightward of mine,
>   and leave the rest of it the hell alone.

  Sure, what else CAN you do in that case?

--Greg