Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!deimos.cis.ksu.edu!mccall!tp From: tp@mccall.com Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Paths and Precedence (Re: Question about From: lines) Message-ID: <3163.26a5a270@mccall.com> Date: 19 Jul 90 12:07:12 GMT References: <3RK4TQE@xds13.ferranti.com> <269B6560.3F1E@intercon.com> <[$6je2.vl6@smurf.sub.org> <7619@gollum.twg.com> Organization: The McCall Pattern Co., Manhattan, KS, USA Lines: 34 In article <7619@gollum.twg.com>, david@twg.com (David S. Herron) writes: > ... The only modification of that strategy which > I would allow is to look into the address for FQDN's and route > directly to the last one. ... This isn't guaranteed to work. Once upon a time, my email address from the internet was tp%mccall.claremont.edu@cunyvm.cuny.edu. the mccall.claremont.edu domain (or the claremont.edu domain) was not registered with the NIC at that time. It only existed on Bitnet. (I don't know of bitnet domains are all registered now, but there's probably other networks that have this problem (milnet?).) The bang-path version of this is, of course: cunyvm.cuny.edu!mccall.claremont.edu!tp Your scheme would break this, because you wouldn't know how to route mccall.claremont.edu!tp, so you'd send it to one of the hosts that advertizes itself as a gateway for .edu, and they wouldn't know either. As I said, this might not be a problem on bitnet anymore, but it might be somewhere. (The question is whether or not you care, I guess.) BTW, just to point out that this is not a contrived example, I did not have a .bitnet address, because I was not on bitnet, I had a PMDF phonenet link (similar to a uucp link for those who don't know) to someone who was. The only way to reach me was to use domain based addressing on bitnet because only his machine knew about the mccall subdomain, and his domain wasn't registered on the internet. Thus you had to route to a bitnet host that understood domain based addressing, and thence to me. -- Terry Poot The McCall Pattern Company (uucp: ...!rutgers!ksuvax1!mccall!tp) 615 McCall Road (800)255-2762, in KS (913)776-4041 Manhattan, KS 66502, USA