Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!itivax!scs From: scs@itivax.iti.org (Steve C. Simmons) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re^2: sigh (was Re: Short-circuiting a route) Message-ID: <2141@itivax.iti.org> Date: 14 Jul 89 13:53:20 GMT References: <1062@aber-cs.UUCP> <59767@uunet.UU.NET> <3648@ncar.ucar.edu> Organization: Industrial Technology Institute, Ann Arbor, MI. Lines: 35 karl@dinosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes: >clewis@eci386.uucp writes: >> It also appears obvious that anyone giving an explicit bang path >> (eg: a!b!c!d) may very well know what they're doing, and it shouldn't be >> touched. >Not so. A random sampling of 263 !-paths which passed through my >system earlier this month (I picked a few wholly arbitrary "grep" >criteria on /usr/spool/uucp/mail.log) revealed that the average !-path >length is more than twice as long as the average length of a path in >/usr/lib/uucp/paths. The users do not know what they are doing. >They're guessing, and badly so. I think we're being a bit too hard on those users here. There are several contributing factors that (probably) make this an inappropriate conclusion. The first obvious culpret is replying to news. Rn (Rnmail?) has generated some really horrendous paths for me to mail 'next door'. Like 20 or so hops. Since a lot of folks have MTAs that don't understand '@' addresses, we're likely to see this sort of pathing until they all fix their mailers. Real Soon Now. :-(. The second is the way a number of the MUAs work. Elm, mush, mailx, etc, can all wind up being configured such that they generate the return path by reversal. While this might be considered Evile (sic) and Rude, if your MTA don't understand '@', it's the only choice. So you wind up generating these bizarre and convoluted paths *and the user never sees them*. They're depending on the MTA to figure out what is needed to reply, *and they should*. -- Steve Simmons scs@vax3.iti.org Industrial Technology Institute Ann Arbor, MI. "Velveeta -- the Spam of Cheeses!" -- Uncle Bonsai