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From: Christopher-Vance@adfa.oz.au
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: rerouting to an absolute address
Message-ID: <1808@ccadfa.adfa.oz.au>
Date: 12 Aug 90 23:15:10 GMT
References: <1990Aug6.230109.4220@ibmpa> <1990Aug7.081953.6108@terminator.cc.umich.edu> <1990Aug7.134658.23389@Octopus.COM>
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Organization: Computer Science, University of New South Wales, ADFA, Canberra, AUSTRALIA
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pete@Octopus.COM (Pete Holzmann) writes:

| If so, what in the world am I supposed to do? Go bug my nameserver every
| time I add a subdomain? That sounds like a pain in the neck, for me and
| for them! They didn't sign up for a hassle like that.

But you don't have that trouble, Pete, because octopus.com includes a
wildcard MX record (last time I checked), so that mail for any subdomain
of octopus.com gets sent to the same place as mail for octopus.com
itself.  Somebody on the DNS can lookup *.octopus.com and get an MX
record back. 

IBM and SGI could do the same, if they wanted to, but since they don't,
*they* are claiming that any subdomain not explicitly mentioned in the
DNS *doesn't exist* (at least from the point of view of anybody using
the Internet).  The cynical among us will note that IBM rarely does
anything the way everybody else does, especially when Everybody Else Is
Right (tm). 

In your case, Internet mail gets sent to sun (your MX forwarder), and
then by sun to you (by UUCP?) and then your UUCP node octopus (a.k.a
octopus.com) gets to decide if it has any subdomains.  This is
different, and perhaps better than listing each subdomain separately,
because in the latter case, you *would* have to alter your DNS data
every time you add a subdomain.  (Well, it's better until octopus
becomes a world-wide multinational corporation and you want different MX
records for different subdomains :-) -- but even then, there is nothing
preventing a wildcard MX record for otherwise unmentioned subdomains.)

-- Christopher