Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!usc!cs.utexas.edu!rice!cathyf From: cathyf@rice.edu (Catherine A. Foulston) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Imminent death of UUCP Zone predicted Message-ID: <9481@brazos.Rice.edu> Date: 30 Jun 90 04:07:41 GMT References: Reply-To: cathyf@brazos.rice.edu (Catherine A. Foulston) Organization: Classical Musak College of Inferior Decorating Lines: 32 In article dalew@twiki.PDX.COM (Dale A. Weber) writes: >karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu writes: >> 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. > > Only if your site talks to site 'stuff' though. If it doesn't then you >need to leave the address alone unless you can find a proper path to get >the mail to that site. The two are not equivalent at all. I've seen >addresses like 'stuff!somebody@site.domain' bounce several times also. I It appears to me that if someone, somewhere, treats 'stuff.uucp' differently from 'stuff,' then they are different, and rewriting 'stuff.uucp' could cause a problem if the mail ever in the future goes through the place that treats them differently. If everybody in the world treats the two in the same way, then they are (by definition?) semantically equivalent. So, is there ever reason to treat them differently? The only reason I see is that, say, stuff.school.edu is known locally as stuff, but there is also a uucp site stuff somewhere nearby. Then one might treat 'stuff' as meaning stuff.school.edu while 'stuff.uucp' would mean the uucp site stuff. If some site does this, then, by the above discussion, stuff.uucp must always be known as stuff.uucp, and nobody can ever rewrite it to just stuff (just as one would never rewrite stuff.com or stuff.org as just 'stuff'), or mail will run into trouble if it passes through school.edu. The chances of the .uucp sticking through the entire travels of the mail seem small. Stuff may not be able to get a real domain name. So what do you do if you're stuff? What if you're school.edu? I can think of a few solutions, but I don't like any of them. Cathy -- Cathy Foulston + cathyf@rice.edu + Rice University, Network & Systems Support