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From: cliff@violet.berkeley.edu (Cliff Frost)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  New Host-Requirement RFCs
Message-ID: <1989Oct23.215823.15531@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 23 Oct 89 21:58:23 GMT
References: <8910231055.AA04607@alw.nih.gov>
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Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In article <8910231055.AA04607@alw.nih.gov> RAF@CU.NIH.GOV ("Roger Fajman") writes:
>> it is a problem in practice, maybe the people hurt by it should speak
>> up, and perhaps something can be worked out eventually to improve matters.
>
>Much of BITNET does not support domain addressing (and therefore cannot
>register with MXs) and is not likely to in the near future.  Many

Actually, any BITNET domain can register with the NIC and MX record
support will be supplied by UC Berkeley and Harvard U.  There are
currently 43 domains taking advantage of this--this is available for
BITNET and related nets; eg Singapore (*.SG), Taiwan (*.TW), etc.

As Rick Adams pointed out, though, it is far easier to deal with
the %-hack syntax.  Consider the problem faced by a mail
relay into the Internet (eg relay.x.edu):  It gets mail destined
for an Internet host, from node "JOE" on the non-internet side.

It can no longer just say it comes from user%JOE@relay.x.edu, nor
can it even say [@relay.x.edu:user@joe].  In order to be "correct"
it now has to figure out what is the Internet name of node "JOE", in
order to construct a return address like [@relay.x.edu:user@joe.foo.gov].
(I think I messed up the source route syntax, but I hope the idea
is clear.)

So, by requiring all names to be valid, registered names, you require
all mail relays to keep reverse MX tables for all their non-internet
nodes.  That might be a tremendous amount of extra work.

	Cliff Frost
	Central Computing Services
	UC Berkeley