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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!harvard!talcott!panda!genrad!decvax!decwrl!sun!plx!adams
From: adams@plx.UUCP (Robert Adams)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: Mail routing -- problems showing up
Message-ID: <166@plx.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 25-Jul-85 20:46:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: plx.166
Posted: Thu Jul 25 20:46:29 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 28-Jul-85 04:15:56 EDT
References: <3018@nsc.UUCP> <2875@topaz.ARPA>
Distribution: net
Organization: Plexus Computers; San Jose, CA
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> I'm not convinced that looking for the Arpa domain is going to solve
> your problem.  There is the small problem that .ARPA is being phased
> out, to be replaced by .EDU, .COM, etc.  But more generally, I am not
> convinced that it is right to have artificially-intelligent parsers
> that decide what foo!bar@baz means based on the semantics of the
> addresses.

It seems impossible to create an addressing format that would
include be compatable on all of the interconnected nets and would
be parsable.  Rob Pike, in a USENIX presentation, brought up the
point about why would we want to have a single addressing format.
Why not have a naming scheme for an individual net and "smart"
gateways that perform the mapping between the nets.

The different nets are radically different -- some centralized,
some chaotic, some ... -- so expecting domaining (which is probably
a good solution for ARPA net) to work on Usenet (which couldn't
keep routing tables in >1000 sites together) is crazy.  Besides,
I don't think there exists a parser that could handle all the
@'s, !'s, %'s, ^'s, and everything else that would work all
the time.

I think work should be done on creating gateways that can do
the mapping between Usenet address and other net addresses
rather than getting the whole of Usenet to convert or use
strange and interesting address parsers and mappers.

   ..!{decvax,ucbvax}!sun!plx!adams             -- Robert Adams