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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxn!ihnp4!ucbvax!fair
From: fair@ucbvax.ARPA (Erik E. Fair)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: Standardising the "postmaster" concept
Message-ID: <10298@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 7-Sep-85 06:09:40 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.10298
Posted: Sat Sep  7 06:09:40 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Sep-85 04:55:45 EDT
References: <426@mungunni.OZ>
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 23

This idea has been in the netnews documentation for a long time. Most
properly set up USENET sites have an address `usenet' which is
supposedly read by the person who administrates netnews (I know that
the sites that I have had anything to do with are set up this way, and
most of the sites that I have had occasion to contact at one time or
another in the last three years are similarly equipped). `Postmaster'
as a valid mail address is required by the ARPA Internet Mail Standard,
RFC822, so all ARPA Internet sites will have a `postmaster', regardless
of whether they have netnews or not. I am also told by various reliable
sources that much of the BITNET has standardized on `POSTMAST' as a
contact ID.

Unfortunately for this idea, all of the versions of UNIX, other than
the ones that come from Berkeley (2 & 4 BSD), have the most bletcherous
mailers that it would ever be your misfortune to encounter, which,
without exception, do not support the concept of an `alias' (e.g.
ucbvax!usenet, ucbvax!erik, and a few other things, can all point to
ucbvax!fair, without existing as entries in /etc/passwd).

So until AT&T and its imitators discover what *real* electronic mailing
systems are like (and what they do), we're stuck with the world as it is...

	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU