Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!vmp!oc
From: oc@vmp.com (Orlan Cannon)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Imminent death of UUCP Zone predicted
Message-ID: <1990Jul22.013945.4041@vmp.com>
Date: 22 Jul 90 01:39:45 GMT
References: <1990Jul16.202721.271@chinet.chi.il.us> <720@logicon.com>
Organization: Video Marketing & Publications, Inc., Oradell, NJ
Lines: 43

In article <720@logicon.com>, Makey@Logicon.COM (Jeff Makey) writes:
> In article <26A76773.3660@intercon.com> amanda@mermaid.intercon.com (Amanda Walker) writes:
> 
> How do you know which is the appropriate host?  Letting uunet handle
> mail to unrecognized domains and unregistered hosts is nothing more
> than a cop-out, as uunet must maintain the routing information that
> you don't.

Wait.  I think I'm missing something here.  How can you possibly say
that letting uunet maintain the proper routing information is a
"cop-out"?  I thought that was one of the reasons uunet was created,
to be that all-important link between uucp and internet, between dumb
mailers and smart mailers, between sites that don't keep a database of
destination sites and the rest of the world...

Sure it costs money, but some people are willing to pay for the price
of having a site that can *correctly* translate their mail from
whatever they choose to send into something that the destination site
wants to receive.  That's what we're talking about here, isn't it.
Uunet does a really good job at this.  (So does osu-cis and several
other sites.  I won't talk about rutgers.)  The people who complain
about uunet's "munging" of headers are sites that never told uunet
what they want to receive.  Out of necessity, they assume that most
uucp sites are "dumb" sites.  Not a bad assumption, from my point of
view.

> As a site that is directly on the Internet, and also speaks UUCP, I
> consider it an important feature of UUCP that it is completely
> independent of the Internet.  My 56Kb Internet connection is great,
> when it works, but it is occasionally unavailable for some reason or
> another (e.g., hardware problems, usage policy).  When this happens,
> UUCP will still get the mail through.

All the more reason for small sites to pass their mail traffic
directly to uunet and let *them* figure out the best way to *deliver*
the message.  You can't expect everyone to have the same resources
that you do.


-- 
Orlan Cannon                            oc@vmp.com
Video Marketing & Publications, Inc.    (800) 627-4551
Oradell, NJ 07649