Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mesquite.charcoal.com!charcoal.com!karl_kleinpaste From: karl_kleinpaste@charcoal.com Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: Mail to Compuserve - Here's what I got.. Message-ID: Date: 10 Sep 90 01:39:30 GMT References: <2478@polari.UUCP> Sender: karl_kleinpaste@mesquite.charcoal.com Distribution: na Organization: Charcoal Communicators Lines: 49 tronix@polari.uucp writes: My question is: Why on Earth is this header so loooong? I can't quite make out the process by which it got to Compuserve and then back to me. Any mail gurus care to answer? [Path from CompuServe showing something akin to osu-cis!gatech!uw-beaver!sumax!polari!tronix, somewhat freely aliased between UUCP OWHNs and Internet FQDNs] That was the address Kathy used to reach you, probably just a blind reply to your From: line, which seems to have worked, in all likelihood, through the arguable magic of smail REROUTE behavior. All things considered, that wasn't a half bad path to reach you, although one could question why gatech got involved. [Path to CompuServe showing something bearing a resemblance to sumax!uw-beaver!ames!mailrus!gatech!cwjcc!osu-cis!compuserve!postmaster] That's because pathalias is a sucky way to route mail between Internet sites. The simplest "!-path" from your site to CompuServe looks like sumax.seattleu.edu!saqqara.cis.ohio-state.edu!compuserve!postmaster because sumax.seattleu.edu (UUCP OWHN "sumax") is IP-accessible and I can ping it from my basement SLIP connection in ~460ms, or ~185ms from Ohio State proper. But pathalias routing involves hand-crafted weighting which is often not especially close to reality, and a !-path showing subpaths of "mailrus!gatech!cwjcc!uccba" or something of that ilk reaching here is pretty common, even though _all_ those hosts can speak directly to OSU over the Internet. Side note, I find it amusing that gatech shows up in 3 Received: headers, as its mailer talked to itself, with the end result that it optimized uccba right out of things, as well as noticing that the original "cwjcc!hal" component really reduces to usenet.ins.cwru.edu. (uccba originally appeared just before osu-cis.) It's not GRR, and it's not DARR, but it's Some Sort Of RR, that's for sure. (And I'll bet you thought that rabid rerouters were ever so rare.) So anyway, your mail to CServe took a particularly contorted route because the pathalias data (probably as invoked by what you called your mailer's "autoroute" option) has routes which don't describe reality, either in the fully-interconnected nature of the Internet, or in the true weightings of which hosts speak to each other how often; and the reply back to you took a not-quite-as-contorted route because Kathy just replied to the supplied From:, with all the meanderings implied therein. --karl