Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!stl!robobar!ronald
From: ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail
Subject: Re: When to reverse domain addresses?
Message-ID: <1990Nov19.073227.3491@robobar.co.uk>
Date: 19 Nov 90 07:32:27 GMT
References: <1990Nov16.155757@ap.co.umist.ac.uk> <23165@ucsd.Edu>
Organization: Robobar Ltd., Perivale, Middx., ENGLAND.
Lines: 38

In article <23165@ucsd.Edu> brian@ucsd.Edu (Brian Kantor) writes:

[ method for solving uk.* deleted ]

> Is this doomed to failure because it's too simple and easy?

What about  poor old UUCP sites running smail 2.5 ?
And what would I put in my netnews headers ?  The same as now ?  Reversed
but with .gb tacked on the end ?  How do I reply to other UK sites ?

There are *lots* of people under .UK who don't have the capability of
understanding reversed names.  Lots of people don't have time to diddle
with the vendor-supplied sendmail.cf, and there are good reasons not
to go with uk-sendmail, like perhaps not liking reversed addresses ?

After all, remember, only the campus mail gateway which talks to JANET
needs to do domain reversal.  I know *academic* sites which operate
internally ONLY in the correct domain order, and lets the mail gateway
reverse it *just* before it hits JANET.  Of course, if the other end
did exactly the same, no one would notice that there were any domain
reversals going on at all.  This is a *much* better solution.  Sure,
it affects all the users in a very visible way, but at least they'll
be warned, instead of just puzzled when their top secret defense-related
mail to cs.ucl.ac.uk ends up behind the iron curtain :-)

Domain reversed names at a user-visible level is a *bug waiting to happen*.
Not all academic sites allow them.  The correct fix is for ALL of them
to do likewise.  No change in JANET software is needed -- that bit only
takes reversed addresses.  Yes, the user level code for non-UNIX systems
will have to change, but that can be gradual.  You'll be surprised
how easy to teach new users that "that machine over there uses reversed
names, and this one here uses sane ones".  Old users, well, that's
the sort of problem that needs "transition relief" in the form of
extra support staff to take the strain of being shouted at :-)

If one JANET site can do it (I know at least one does) why can't they all?
-- 
ronald@robobar.co.uk +44 81 991 1142 (O) +44 71 229 7741 (H)