Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!bfmny0!tneff From: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Imminent death of UUCP Zone predicted Message-ID: <15616@bfmny0.BFM.COM> Date: 28 Jun 90 09:34:42 GMT References: <2680D75A.2C1F@tct.uucp> <1990Jun28.164938.23367@DSI.COM> Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) Lines: 36 Everyone with a UUCP site has already had to solve the problem of finding a feed site or sites. Finding an MX forwarder is an analogous issue. If one of your UUCP feed sites is on the Internet, it would be logical to ask them to be your MX forwarder. If none of your UUCP feeds are on the Internet, then you can either (a) find a new direct site that is on the Internet and ask them to MX you, or (b) try your feeds' feeds themselves. Someone should turn up within a couple of hops. For myself I don't feel the UUCP Zone was a bad thing. What *was* bad was the way various news and mail packages started plugging in "yoursite.UUCP" as the default return address, whether or not you had actually registered! That ruined the usefulness of the pseudo-domain, because you could never trust the designation. Done properly, with everything effectively MX'ed from UUCP gateways, it might have worked. The other fly in the ointment is the unreliability of syntaxes for hybrid Internet/UUCP addresses. There are all sorts of authoritative RFCs lying around on the subject, but out in the field it's chaos. I have been round and round the post with the forms site!user@MAJORSITE.NET user%site@MAJORSITE.NET user%site.UUCP@MAJORSITE.NET MAJORSITE.NET!site!user with and without quote marks scattered around in likely places. (The only one I have gotten reliably to work is No. 2.) Of course some purists like to say "if it doesn't conform, ignore it" but in practice some of us DO want to get through. -- "DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT blow the hatch!" /)\ Tom Neff "Roger....hatch blown!" \(/ tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM