Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: New Host-Requirement RFCs Message-ID: <1989Oct29.040104.17081@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <1989Oct27.212939.11277@agate.berkeley.edu> <89Oct27.235825edt.2687@neat.cs.toronto.edu> <1514@intercon.com> Date: Sun, 29 Oct 89 04:01:04 GMT In article <1514@intercon.com> amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) writes: >... If you want to use source routing, that means that you know >more about delivering mail than your mail gateway. This shows that your >mail gateway is Really And Truly Broken, not that you need to use %s. No, it merely means that you know more than your gateway. This is not an unusual state of affairs outside the cozy little best-case Internet world. In the cold, ugly outside world, information about things like topology changes and new hosts can take quite a while to propagate and is often incomplete. In the real world of inter-networking, the gateways *do not* dependably have the most complete and current information. >The more people stop supporting the %-hack, the more broken mail gateways >will become their owners problems, and not the rest of the world's. This >will be a Good Thing, as far as I am concerned. (Modulo the above considerations...) It is a Good Thing if your objective is to get the gateways fixed. It very definitely is not if you are one of the long-suffering users who has no power over the local gateway and just wants to get his mail through! In practice, people tend to have this strange idea that a mail system should give mail delivery priority over ideological purity. -- A bit of tolerance is worth a | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology megabyte of flaming. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu