Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!deimos.cis.ksu.edu!mccall!tp From: tp@mccall.com Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Who pays the bill? Message-ID: <3275.26b54aab@mccall.com> Date: 31 Jul 90 09:08:59 GMT References: <26A738A8.725B@tct.uucp> <26B059CA.57CF@tct.uucp> <3270.26b4665b@mccall.com> Organization: The McCall Pattern Co., Manhattan, KS, USA Lines: 60 In article , lear@turbo.bio.net (Eliot) writes: > I claim that I will be wrong fewer times than the users passing mail > through me. In addition I'll be respecting the wishes of those who > use the map data to control just how much volume will pass through > their sites. > > Given the following path: > > bionet!uwm.edu!wuarchive!uunet!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!deimos.cis.ksu.edu!mccall!tp Are there still news systems that use the Path: line for replies? That is the only way someone could generate the above garbage. My From: address is tp@mccall.com, and any mail to that address will generate an optimal path according to pathalias. Any news system that does that is broken (always was). Lean on the sender to fix it. Few people actually generate paths by hand all the way to the destination. Other than broken news systems, who's paths are you trying to fix? > compared to bionet!deimos.cis.ksu.edu!mccall!tp, which would you think > more expensive? If you generate this path, your system is wrong. Mail should never reach me through deimos.cis.ksu.edu (which is dedicated to being a news server). Your path is no more correct than the original. In this particular case yours is shorter and faster and both will work, but that isn't always true. Some news links don't pass mail. > I make several checks to do all but eliminate the chances that the > mccall at the end will be any other mccall but your mccall. The > possibility for an incorrect path if you are registered with the UUCP > maps is nonexistant. And conversely if a site is not in the maps, I take it the chance of error is 100%? It certainly is if an unmapped site has the same name as one that is in the maps. (I really would be curious as to what checks can be made to verify a path.) Once upon a time, my email address was . Expressed as a bang-path, this would be "...!cunyvm.cuny.edu!mccall.claremont.edu!tp". How would your system route this? As "bionet!mccall.claremont.edu!tp"? If so, and if you aren't on bitnet, you just lost my mail. Neither "mccall.claremont.edu" nor "claremont.edu" was at that time a registered domain on the internet. They only existed on bitnet. That's a real-world example. I don't know if it applies to bitnet anymore, but nobody can state definitively that it doesn't apply anywhere. Yes it is an ugly address, but there is no reason to drop the mail because of it. In the case you stated, does it cost you any more to send to uwm.edu than to send to deimos.cis.ksu.edu? Granted I'll get my mail sooner via your route, but some people won't get it at all by going through your machine. As I said, rutgers does the same thing you do. I can't generally reach sites in weird places like milnet (which generally require one or more "%" in their address) through rutgers, and have to manually reroute. Maybe your system is smarter, I don't know. -- 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