Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!bellcore!madeleine!tr From: tr@madeleine.ctt.bellcore.com (tom reingold) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions Subject: Re: questions Summary: Incorrect info has been posted. Message-ID: <17315@bellcore.bellcore.com> Date: 31 Jul 89 17:13:57 GMT References: <4051@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU> Sender: news@bellcore.bellcore.com Reply-To: tr@bellcore.com (tom reingold) Distribution: usa Organization: Bellcore, Piscataway, Noo Joizy Lines: 40 On the subject of "questions", mellon@zayante.pa.dec.com (Ted Lemon) writes: $ [...] $ $ There are two more kinds of addresses that you need to know about. $ One of these is somewhat insidious, so we'll examine the easy one $ first. The easy one is a usenet address. A usenet address consists $ of a series of host names, starting with one that's a direct $ connection from yours, and ending with the name of the person you want $ to get to. For example, if my machine (zayante) had a uucp $ connection to a machine called gondor, which had a connection to a $ machine called gnrrf, and I had a friend named bill who had an account $ on gnrrf, I could send that friend mail using the address $ ``gondor!gnrrf!bill''. This is not usenet, it's called uucp, which stands for "unix to unix copy" although I think this protocol is no longer limited to computers that run Unix. Usenet is an informal term for the set of machines that exchange netnews. It comprises machines that are on many different wide area networks. $ As you can see, there are two sorts of address operators being used $ here - the ! (bang) and @ (at) operators. The @ operator takes $ precedence over the ! operator, which means that an address like $ ``foo!bar@baz'' tells your mailer to send the mail to the machine baz, $ which will send the mail to the machine foo, which will send the mail $ to the user bar. There is no rule that everyone agrees on that says '@' takes precedence over '!'. Different mailers parse these differently. Many do as you say. Others do the opposite, although thankfully few these days. But an unfortunate many do not parse mixed addresses like this at all, regarding them as errors. $ [...] Tom Reingold |INTERNET: tr@bellcore.com Bell Communications Research |UUCP: bellcore!tr 444 Hoes La room 1H217 |PHONE: (201) 699-7058 [work], Piscataway, NJ 08854-4182 | (201) 287-2345 [home]