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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!gatech!cbosgd!mark
From: mark@cbosgd.ATT.COM (Mark Horton)
Newsgroups: net.news.sa,net.news.adm
Subject: Re: sendsys msgs and return paths
Message-ID: <2755@cbosgd.ATT.COM>
Date: Wed, 15-Oct-86 13:14:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbosgd.2755
Posted: Wed Oct 15 13:14:45 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 15-Oct-86 21:59:43 EDT
References: <602@imagen.UUCP> <424@spdcc.UUCP> <30ac6214.1de6@apollo.uucp>
Organization: AT&T Medical Information Systems, Columbus
Lines: 24
Xref: mnetor net.news.sa:278 net.news.adm:726

In article <30ac6214.1de6@apollo.uucp> rees@apollo.uucp (Jim Rees) writes:
>Only if your software is stupid.  Sending mail along the news path is
>anti-social at best, and wrong at worst.  The path only reflects the path
>the news took, and does not necessarily reflect an optimal, or even a
>valid, mail path.  Semi-stupid mailers (like the one we run) will look
>up a path in a pathalias data base given the site name of the target.
>Smart mailers will use Honeyman's pathparse to disambiguate the target
>and look up an optimal (modulo GIGO) path to it.

Actually, on a system with a smart mailer (e.g. netnews has INTERNET
defined) the reply will go back to the From line, not the Path line.
Assuming that the From line is valid, it doesn't matter what path
the message took.  If you run smart mail software like smail or uumail
on your system, this is easy.

I can't see how pathparse would be of any help in this situation.  The
major practical application of pathparse is figuring out what's going
on when there is mixed %@ and ! syntax in an address.  The Path line
always generates a left-to-right path.  The From line doesn't get munged
when netnews is transmitted (at least, it isn't supposed to, and I don't
know of any systems that do) and it's generally in pure @ syntax.  Since
most sites are currently only registered in UUCP, it does help to have
a mailer that understands user@host.UUCP, which mailers such as smail
and uumail do.