Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cwjcc!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!chinet!les From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: Re^2: sigh (was Re: Short-circuiting a route) Message-ID: <8984@chinet.chi.il.us> Date: 17 Jul 89 19:12:36 GMT References: <1062@aber-cs.UUCP> <59767@uunet.UU.NET> <3648@ncar.ucar.edu> <2141@itivax.iti.org> Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix Lines: 31 In article <2141@itivax.iti.org> scs@itivax.iti.org (Steve C. Simmons) writes: >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. :-(. Did anyone think that people typed those 20-hop paths by hand? Especially people who don't know what they are doing? Replies to news articles and subsequent replies to those messages are almost certainly the source of everything the rabid rerouters complain about. So, why not fix it in the news software by making hosts that are capable of re-routing rewrite the Path: line so that mail following the Path: will be "dynamically" re-routed? That way the dumber downstream sites don't need to change anything (any they probably won't anyway). >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*. Reversing a good path should not give you a bizarre and convoluted path, although it will only work if the connections appear the same from both directions (generally true for uucp sites) or gateway sites rewrite the path as necessary to make it reversable. Les Mikesell