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From: avolio@decuac.UUCP (Frederick M. Avolio)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: Mail routing -- problems showing up - (nf)
Message-ID: <581@decuac.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 29-Jul-85 21:07:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: decuac.581
Posted: Mon Jul 29 21:07:39 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 31-Jul-85 03:49:55 EDT
References: <3018@nsc.UUCP> <11500001@unido.UUCP> <1084@diku.UUCP>
Organization: ULTRIX Applications Center, MD
Lines: 31

In article <11500001@unido.UUCP> dfk@unido.UUCP (Daniel Karrenberg) writes:
>I admit this was rather lengthy, so let me repeat the morale:
>     1) don't mix ! and @

In article <1084@diku.UUCP>, kimcm@diku.UUCP (Kim Christian Madsen) writes:
> One of the pleasant news I've got earlier this year was that many,
> backbone sites are doing a rerouting of the paths to a given site.
>       ...
> Now I can relax and say
> 	mcvax!user@site.domain

First, I agree... do not mix ! and @ because it is ambiguous -- you
can never be certain how someone down the line will interpret it.  For
my money, I'd go with (h!j!k!...z)@n.d since RFC-something-or-other
makes a case for it (I think).  Consequently, Daniel, you cannot say
mcvax!user@site.domain and be sure of how it'll come out, but sites
should strive to handle an address such as mcvax!site.domain!user.

Furthermore, many "backbone" sites are *not* doing rerouting.  There
should be a set of well-advertised sites which do and will (it is
pretty cheap to do).  I hope this is a by-product of some of the work
The UUCP Project is doing.

Anyway, some folks would think me radical.  I mean I think it is
*never* proper (well almost never) to change anything in the header of
a mail message passing through -- only the "envelope" should be
touched.  The only exception is a gateway site cleaning up addresses
(such as we do -- we change any node::user to user@node.DEC for mail
coming from DEC's Enet).

Fred.