Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!uunet!intercon!news From: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Imminent death of UUCP Zone predicted Message-ID: <26A76773.3660@intercon.com> Date: 20 Jul 90 20:20:02 GMT References: <1990Jul16.202721.271@chinet.chi.il.us> <26A4DCA7.16B1@intercon.com> Sender: usenet@intercon.com (USENET The Magnificent) Reply-To: amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker) Organization: InterCon Systems Corporation, Herndon, VA Lines: 49 In article , peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: > I was under the impression that you were > opposed to the mail routing agent building explicit bang paths, and that > you were in favor of breaking explicit routing to force sites to route > mail via the domain name system. That, to me, is sheer lunacy. Ah. The transport-level destination (the "envelope address" in SMTP, or the "From " line in UUCP) is the routing agent's business. For any site connected via UUCP (aside from the trivial case of being one hop away from the internet), bang paths will end up in the transport destination given the current state of the net. However, the RFC822 "To:" and "From:" lines should *only* contain domain addresses, and any intermediate site should be able to make a routing decision for the message (or a reply) based on those domain addresses alone, unless the mail is routed only via UUCP. Ideally, in my opinion, the transport-level destination should just be a copy of the RFC822 "To:" address, but that is currently impractical given the number of RFC822-ignorant UUCP sites out in the world. This I regard as an opportunity for improvement :-). For example, we have the luxury of being connected via uunet, which is a "real live" Internet site, and all of our private UUCP links are to sites which grok domain addresses. Therefore, even though all of our offsite mail travels via UUCP, no bang paths ever even enter the picture unless we are sending mail to a domain-less UUCP site (and even that is only because uunet is willing to deal with bang-paths as addresses). For example, when my sendmail decides a message is headed offsite, it queues up a UUX command to the appropriate host that says "rmail user@host.domain". I don't have to run pathalias; our newsfeed doesn't even include comp.mail.maps... Even if we took on downstream feeds, as long as they all had domain names we still wouldn't need maps or pathalias. I consider this to be a feature. I do not see why anyone but the site directly involved should have to care about how machines are actually connected, only what particular machine a piece of mail is going to. The DNS serves admirably well at providing this information. Running pathalias and keeping your own complete UUCP map for doing source routing is like using old-style host tables on the Internet... Local connectivity information should stay local. I remember when pathalias was new, and I even then I thought that it was a sign that a different mail routing mechanism was needed... -- Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation