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From: dianeh@ism780c.UUCP (Diane Holt)
Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.adm,net.mail
Subject: Re: ihnp4 problems
Message-ID: <3414@ism780c.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 29-Aug-86 22:27:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: ism780c.3414
Posted: Fri Aug 29 22:27:42 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 31-Aug-86 02:27:33 EDT
References: <782@laidbak.UUCP> <41334@beno.seismo.CSS.GOV> <1727@ihlpa.UUCP> <3880@ut-ngp.UUCP> <6571@sri-spam.ARPA>
Reply-To: dianeh@ism780c.UUCP (Diane Holt)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica, CA
Lines: 44
Xref: mnetor net.news:2007 net.news.adm:681 net.mail:1079

In article <6571@sri-spam.ARPA> gds@sri-spam.ARPA (The lost Bostonian) writes:

	[Very sensible presentation suggesting that autorouting by "smart
	 mailers" should either be reconsidered or allow for a way of
	 overriding.]

I agree wholeheartedly. I just experienced my first toss-my-message-across-
the-country--hold-it-trying-to-contact-an-uncontactable-machine--toss-a-
message-back-across-the-country-telling-me-it-can't-go-through--and-do-it-
all-again game.  Now, I knew my message's destination was only about 300
miles north of here, so I specifically looked for a full path routing that
would keep it in CA.  When I got a message from ihnp4 telling me it couldn't
contact wb2, my first reaction was "How the hell did my message end up at
ihnp4?", so I did some checking around and found out about autorouting
("optimizing").  It is difficult for me to imagine that sending my message
from the West coast to the East coast and then a message back to me
(actually, it happened twice, because the first time it happened I figured
I'd just try to resend it with the same routing and hope for the best)
doesn't seem like much of an "optimization" to me -- and when I found out I
*couldn't* override it, I was incensed...there should NEVER be an
"automation" that can't be manually overridden -- GPs!  Well, I finally found
a routing that would avoid the machine (sdcrdcf) that was autorouting, but
the whole process of getting my message from Santa Monica, CA to Palo Alto,
CA took two weeks!

Now, I'm not against autorouting per se, but for it to be truly efficient
it should either 1) guarantee that it's rerouting will in fact be the most
optimal (and a successful) path (which seems unlikely due to the maintenance
overhead of the database it uses), or 2) it should allow for users to
*override* it. I vote for #2 in any case.

P.S. I used to offer a return mail path in my signature that included ihnp4;
I don't think I'll be doing that from now on, now that I know about the
problems that inhp4 is having. That information should be made more generally
available.

Diane Holt
Interactive Systems Corp.
Santa Monica, CA
decwrl!sequent!ism780c!dianeh

"You depend on it for so much, but are any of you really its master?"
(Originally said in reference to language, but the way things are going it
 looks like it could start being applied to technology.)