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From: chris@umcp-cs.UUCP (Chris Torek)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: Mail addressing and routing
Message-ID: <1370@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 24-Aug-85 10:07:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1370
Posted: Sat Aug 24 10:07:51 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 27-Aug-85 02:20:14 EDT
References: <644@adobe.UUCP> <734@vortex.UUCP> <1156@umcp-cs.UUCP> <263@ncr-sd.UUCP>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
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[As Greg says, read the parent article, it's too hard to summarize here.]

As far as the internal format of my proposed database, I was
intentionally leaving that unspecified; we already have a database
that uses "printf-like" format controls (the host name is straight
text, with a single occurrence of "%s" for the user name; in fact,
the string is handed to sprintf inside sendmail, if I understand
Bruce's hacks correctly).  It is definitely an implementation issue,
and printffy formats are probably the way to go.

(Note that with Greg's format I could easily use the proposed "bang
domain name" scheme, mapping userX@hostY.partialroutedom to %R!%D!%U,
where %R is the route, %D is hostY.partialroutedom, and %U is userX,
in this case.  Also note that the scheme used is per-host, another
very nice feature during experimentation periods at different
hosts....)

As for final delivery to a real user given a (potentially ambiguous)
real name (as opposed to a mail identifier---on Unix systems this
is one's login name), that should certainly be standardized, but
it is a separate issue from mapping fully-qualified host names
(whether they be pathalias- found by examining uucp edge databases
or whether they be domain names) to routes, and probably belongs
in a separate program (the local host mail deliverer in our case).
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 4251)
UUCP:	seismo!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet:	chris@umcp-cs		ARPA:	chris@maryland