Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!karl_kleinpaste From: karl_kleinpaste@cis.ohio-state.edu Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Imminent death of UUCP Zone predicted Message-ID: Date: 30 Jul 90 15:26:19 GMT References: <9@raysnec.UUCP> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 55 shwake@raysnec.uucp writes: While I agree completely with your first contention, a return to first principles will clarify... No offense, but seeing that opener makes me think, "oh, spare me..." Electronic mail as handled by UUCP involves two files: ... Yes, but my mail transports here involve considerably more than UUCP. I use sendmail as a transport-independent router. Mail comes in via four transports; it goes out by a choice of five. Most sites have similar problems, that they can't discuss email "as handled by UUCP," because it's not productive to leave the transports wholly separated as you seem to suggest. By the time mail gets into sendmail, I no longer concern myself with the transport by which it arrived. I am deciding the transport by which it should leave. I make decisions based on how the recipient will react to things, not how the sender viewed it. An example: So I get mail on the transport commonly called UUCP; rmail picks it up during uuxqt, showing an envelope origin of "thatsite!user" and a destination of "osu-20!JoeSchmo", and...and...and it's supposed to head out of here via SMTP to the DEC-20 down the hall, BUT Bozo Originating User didn't put FQDNs in either his envelope or headers. BOGON ALERT: That DEC-20 runs MAISER and gets really uptight because It Believes In The RFCs ("Do YOU believe, brother?" "I *BELIEVE*!"), and (can you guess?) your mail won't get delivered UNLESS I hack BOTH the envelope AND the header. Less catastrophic examples abound -- I see a lot of $#!+ flow through here. UUCP does not exist in isolation. If it did, you would have a point; it doesn't, you don't. Existence proof. [quoting Honeyman's UNIX Review interview:] The delivery agent should do nothing more than receive an envelope, read it, and pass it along. But *sendmail* breaks the rules not only by opening the letter and inspecting it but by actually modifying its contents. That's illegal! That's immoral! That's outrageous! How could you [Allman] possibly write a program that does that? Easy. I _expect_ that both the envelope and headers are going to be broken and unreplyable; see above. I make a very good attempt at seeing to it that what leaves my system is replyable. Validity, therefore, depends on the rules of the environment. Yes, it does. The problem is that UUCP must co-exist within an environment that includes the Internet, even though it sometimes seems to believe it exists by itself. --karl