Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!intercon!amanda@intercon.com From: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: New Host-Requirement RFCs Message-ID: <1518@intercon.com> Date: 29 Oct 89 13:13:07 GMT References: <1989Oct27.212939.11277@agate.berkeley.edu> <89Oct27.235825edt.2687@neat.cs.toronto.edu> <1514@intercon.com> <1989Oct29.040104.17081@utzoo.uucp> Sender: news@intercon.com Reply-To: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation Lines: 33 In article <1989Oct29.040104.17081@utzoo.uucp>, henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: > >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. Well, so do I, but the two are not entirely separate. My objective in this case is indeed to get the gateways fixed, since that will improve mail delivery for everyone involved. As I said at the beginning of my article, it may not be reasonable to expect all mail flowing on the Internet to involve simple domain-style addresses; the %-hack is in my sendmail.cf, even though I don't think it's ever been used here, for that very reason. However, I still maintain that it should not be considered an acceptable way to specify a mail destination on any kind of permanent basis, as some people have been arguing. I send mail regularly to people via %-!-@ paths, because it's the only way to get mail to them, but in every single case, I consider the mail gateway to be broken. I feel that I shouldn't have to source route my mail any more than I should have to source route my telnet sessions... -- Amanda Walker -- "If your application does not run correctly, do not blame the operating system." -- Geoffrey James, _The_Zen_of_Programming