Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!CU.NIH.GOV!RAF
From: RAF@CU.NIH.GOV ("Roger Fajman")
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re:  New Host-Requirement RFCs
Message-ID: <8910252236.AA14405@alw.nih.gov>
Date: 25 Oct 89 22:37:28 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 30

> This is not a "join our network" coercion technique, either.
> CompuServe has not "joined" the Internet by any stretch of the
> imagination.  But they are registered (in both registries; I
> registered compuserve.com before I even told CServe what I was
> building), and mail gets there as seamlessly as it gets anywhere else.
> I considered the RFCs not to be inconvenient, but to provide the
> standard against which to implement.  Since the first time that email
> has been able to get between CServe and The Greater Out Here, no %
> hack (or other ill-advised routing nonsense) has ever been necessary.
>
> Getting registered is easy.  Building a gateway is easy.  They're both
> too easy to go to the effort of avoiding the issue with things like %
> hacks.

But CompuServe is essentially a single host (as it appears to the
outside world, anyway).  When you have a network of many non-Internet
hosts operated by independent organizations the problem becomes much
more difficult.  One can either adopt domain naming on the non-Internet
network (as the UUCP network did, I believe) or build some sort of
translation between the two name spaces into the gateway.  Neither one
is necessarily very easy to do.  In the latter case, the biggest
problem is getting all the organiztions registered and collecting the
information to do the translation.  And when you are done, users still
have to be aware of two forms of addresses.  If I'm on XYZ net (which
does not use domains) and I want to tell my friend on the Internet how
to mail to me, I will still have know the name of my host on the
Internet.

P.S. - If it's all so easy, how come the From address in the message
that I am replying to had an ! in the local part?