Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!karl_kleinpaste From: karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Imminent death of UUCP Zone predicted Message-ID: Date: 28 Jun 90 15:46:41 GMT References: <2680D75A.2C1F@tct.uucp> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 44 chip@tct.uucp writes: ...I must object to the implication that it is therefore acceptable to *sabotage* the UUCP zone before it dies a natural death. ... Speaking for users in the UUCP zone: We would appreciate the cooperation of gateway administrators in keeping our mail working as it has been. Please do not mangle UUCP zone addresses. We'll get registered eventually! There's no need to coerce us into changing by mangling our return addresses. I respectfully disagree. Domain-coping mailers have existed for UUCP-only sites since at least 1985, when smail 2.1 came out. Smail 2.5 hasn't been patched or otherwise updated officially (e.g., via Horton, Auton, et al) since 1987. Five years is darn well plenty of time to have expected people to have gotten registered. One of the first tasks which a new site should undertake when connecting is to get such a domain name. And it's an easy, reasonably quick and progressively better documented procedure. A lot of sites have staff (e.g., me) who will happily do a bunch of the legwork for such a site gratis, just for the sake of the improvement to the domain space by annihilating yet another UUCP-centric name; and UUNET and others will do it for a smallish fee. It's an existence proof, and nothing more: You (the editorial "you," meaning all ".uucp" site admins) haven't yet registered, and you've had a bloody long time in which to do so; therefore I have no reason to expect that you ever will unless forced. I have been tempted on several occasions to stop acknowledging the pseudodomain .uucp much as I have been tempted to stop acknowledging .bitnet. Note that I don't "sabotage" stuff.uucp in the sense you seem to mean. I do rewrite such things from "somebody@stuff.uucp" to "stuff!somebody." As far as I can see, the two are semantically equivalent. I simply refuse to hand "somebody@stuff.uucp" to an SMTP-reached site. There are a surprisingly large number of them that (correctly) refuse to acknowledge ".uucp." I send them "stuff!somebody@cis.ohio-state.edu." postmaster with an attitude, --karl -- Depression \di-'presh-un\ n. A condition observed on return from 3 weeks' vacation to find ~2000 mail messages waiting for oneself. (And people marvel that I employ GNUS as a mail-reading interface.)