Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!albanycs!crdgw1!uunet!mcvax!ukc!kl-cs!jonathan From: jonathan@cs.keele.ac.uk (Jonathan Knight) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: sigh (was Re: Short-circuiting a route) Message-ID: <670@kl-cs.UUCP> Date: 15 Jul 89 15:01:30 GMT References: Organization: University of Keele, England Lines: 61 I can see that the re-routers are unlikely to stop re-routing or short circuiting so this argument is unlikely to have any useful effect. I generally feel that re-routers are treating a symptom and not the cause of badly routed mail. The cause of badly routed mail lies with the user or the mailer which originated the mail. So I propose a solution: After re-routing the mail, the re-router should send mail to the orginator of the mail explaining what has happened and suggesting they see their local postmaster. Something along the lines of: " Your mail arrived here using this route a!b!c and was routed to d!e!f!g. However a more optimum path from your site to site 'f' and user 'g' would have been a!b!j!f!g. Your mail has been routed j!f!g from here. Please consult your local postmaster for additional information. " This will solve the cause of the problem, as users who guessed a route will become gradually better informed about a better route and the local postmaster (or whoever looks after the mail) will be able to better configure his or her mailer. If the problem lies at another site then the postmaster should be able to deduce where the problem lies and call up the postmaster at that site. Hopefully over time the need for re-routing will gradually die out. Perhaps those who don't re-route could also generate messages like the above to educate users about optimum mail paths. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Short circuiting is a little harder to deal with. The problem is that it is harder to justify. Paths that look like this: a.b.c.d!e.f.g.h!j.k.l.m!z don't look good. However paths like this: z%j.k.l.m%e.f.g.h@a.b.c.d are justifyable (see my first posting which explains why this is necessary). No-one can claim that the above is equivalent to z@j.k.l.m unless they hold up to date tables (and I MEAN up to date - even to the point of getting local bulitins of machines that went down that morning) of all the domains in use in the world today. Even so, there will be some who think that they can short circuit without problems, so perhaps they also should generate mail back to the sender so they can query their postmaster to find a better way of addressing their mail. I feel that moves must be made to eradicate badly addresses mail from the network, rather than trying to patch it up once its on its way. Sending mail back to the users telling them that they've done it wrong is a start, it should make people look more closely at how they address their mail - it might help. -- ______ JANET :jonathan@uk.ac.keele.cs Jonathan Knight, / BITNET:jonathan%cs.kl.ac.uk@ukacrl Department of Computer Science / _ __ other :jonathan@cs.keele.ac.uk University of Keele, Keele, (_/ (_) / / UUCP :...!ukc!kl-cs!jonathan Staffordshire. ST5 5BG. U.K.