Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!deimos.cis.ksu.edu!mccall!tp From: tp@mccall.com Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Imminent death of UUCP Zone predicted Message-ID: <3253.26b01f15@mccall.com> Date: 27 Jul 90 11:01:40 GMT References: <3143.26a2edd9@mccall.com> <1990Jul23.185016.7921@chinet.chi.il.us> <3209.26adae8e@mccall.com> <1990Jul26.203210.25331@chinet.chi.il.us> Organization: The McCall Pattern Co., Manhattan, KS, USA Lines: 57 In article <1990Jul26.203210.25331@chinet.chi.il.us>, les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes: > 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: >>> ... why not just give them >>> a subdomain under your own domain? ... >>That's always an option, but ... > > 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. ... Actually, I think the administrative hierarchy inherent in domain names is in general good. I don't think my mail forwarder has any administrative authority over me. I can always get another one, and I can even pay for the service (uunet), in effect giving me administrative authority over my forwarder (if you believe, as I do, that a service provider is responsible and accountable to its customers). The up side of the administrative hierarchy is precisely the ability you first referred to of being able to administrate subdomains without anyone else being involved. My possible reluctance to do it comes less from the administrative authority I'm expected to exert over the subdomain (which is slight to say the least), as the fact that my company name would appear in his address. It's a corporate image thing. If I had a domain name for a home machine, or something of that sort, I'd very likely be willing to hand out subdomains with little or no reservation. > 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. You can encapsulate it just fine in the local part of a legal address. The problem is that with uucp addresses, this generates the dreaded hybrid address. If all mailers that received a hybrid address were RFC822 compliant, and all mailers that passed such an address were at least compliant enough not to alter it, it would work perfectly well. Using a pure bang-path in a From: line won't work precisely because it is not legal. There are conventions on what to do with such a thing, but they aren't universally followed, and won't be unless they are added to the standard. >>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. I expect they will, since the implicit assumption seems to be that ALL email will at some future time be x.400 compliant (at least that's what it seems from what I've read). -- 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