Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!mcdchg!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Imminent death of UUCP Zone predicted
Message-ID: <1990Jul26.203210.25331@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 26 Jul 90 20:32:10 GMT
References: <3143.26a2edd9@mccall.com> <1990Jul23.185016.7921@chinet.chi.il.us> <3209.26adae8e@mccall.com>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Lines: 41

In article <3209.26adae8e@mccall.com> tp@mccall.com writes:
>In article <1990Jul23.185016.7921@chinet.chi.il.us>, les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:

>> If you are the primary mail feed to someone else, why not just give them
>> a subdomain under your own domain?  No one else needs to get involved
>> at all that way.

>That's always an option, but he may want his own domain. Also, doing so
>means my company's name is on all mail and postings emanating from his
>site. That implies some degree of trust that this person won't embarass
>me/us. It isn't obvious to anyone seeing the address that this person isn't
>affiliated with the company.

This points out the fact that using a token with a defined purpose of
denoting mail administrative authority for something else is a bad
idea.  A mail forwarder obviously has an administrative relationship
to the mail of the connected sites so it would make sense to me to make
that connection visible, although perhaps not with a name that would
identify the organization in other contexts.  Does anyone know why
uunet is phasing out the use of anymachine.uunet.uu.net where
anymachine is one of their suscribers? 

>Internet sites, including gateways, are not required to do anything
>regarding the format of mail messages except comply with RFC822. The fact
>that many do more is because they are nice. You certainly can't expect
>everyone to do more, because there isn't a standard to tell them what they
>should be doing. Until a standard exists that covers these situations, you
>can't even get agreement on what the gateway should be doing. 

This is exactly the problem - there is no defined way to encapsulate local
syntax within an RFC822 address.  Unless you believe that every mailer
in the world is going to become RFC822 complaint, this is a fatal flaw.

>If every site insisted
>that sites connecting to it must be standard-compliant, we wouldn't be
>discussing these problems, as they would not exist.

I suppose X.400 complaint sites will be more careful to avoid this mistake.

Les Mikesell
 les@chinet.chi.il.us