Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!lavaca.uh.edu!uhnix1!texbell!vector!telecom-gateway From: smb@hector.att.com Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: ATTMAIL Access? Message-ID: Date: 18 Nov 89 16:02:19 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Lines: 38 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 520, message 1 of 12 >From: "Daniel M. Rosenberg" >Stuff sent to host.att.com currently goes through att.arpa, aka >research.att.com. Soon this will be inet.att.com. AT&T doesn't want to >forward to machines outside of AT&T, and the error message you got >here indicates that even for attmail, which is significantly enough >outside of the AT&T machine network. Not quite. Arpa.att.com is indeed the mail gateway for AT&T right now. It will soon be retired -- it's heavily overloaded -- and will be replaced by a new machine which may retain the old name as an alias. Inet.att.com, though it exists now, will be a special-purpose gateway; only a few research organizations within Bell Labs will use it. The rest of the company will use the general gateway. The difference is unimportant to anyone on the outside; MX records will be used to select the proper gateway for any inbound mail. Attempts to manually-route mail will likely fail; inet, at least, will be unable (and not just unwilling) to handle such mail, I believe. At the present time, neither machine will accept mail for ATTMAIL. ATTMAIL is a commercial service; there are many non-AT&T users of it. It is not possible to distinguish on the basis of hostname which recipients are or are not AT&T employees. Also note that ATTMAIL charges for messages sent. >So, with that answer, I have a question: just who the heck is UUNET >and why do they let us bounce all our mail off of them? UUNET is a non-profit corporation founded by Usenix to act as a mail and netnews hub. You're supposed to pay for their services, too... I doubt very much that they'd forward to ATTMAIL for free, especially since ATTMAIL would charge them for doing so. Speaking unofficially, --Steve Bellovin smb@ulysses.att.com