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From: jc@cdx39.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers,comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: more about autorouting
Message-ID: <613@cdx39.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 21-Jan-87 09:43:17 EST
Article-I.D.: cdx39.613
Posted: Wed Jan 21 09:43:17 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Jan-87 09:39:42 EST
References: <14396@amdcad.UUCP>
Organization: Codex Corp, a division of Motorola; Canton, MA, USA
Lines: 67
Xref: mnetor comp.mail.headers:101 comp.mail.uucp:173

> 
> For those who just dropped in, my claim (or plea) was:
> 
> 1) don't reroute a!b!c!joe
> 	a) even if you think d!c!joe is better
> 		o your map data could be out of date
> 		o site d's map data could be wrong about its costs
> 		o sender may know site d is down
> 	b) even if you directly connect to site b
> 		o sender may be trying to test site a's connectivity
	c) even if d!c!joe really is faster and/or cheaper
		o the mail may be private or proprietary
		o sender may have security-related reasons to avoid d

I've run into several cases where a!b!c!joe is all within a single
company, but d!c!joe goes through an 'outside' site.  Many companies
are concerned that mail of a proprietary nature be restricted to the
company's own machines.  In such cases, autorouting would generally
be undesirable, unless I have a way of suppressing it for a specific
piece of mail.  The easiest way to do this is probably something like
Phil's suggestion:

> 2) do route joe@c.domain
> 	you have to route this anyway.

The 'security' issue is a somewhat stronger one.  I suspect that those
among us with strong interests in having a secure system are not now
installing mailers that do autorouting.  There is just too much danger
that a message to headquarters will be routed through berkeley or
moskvax.  [It's hard to say which would be considered the biggest
security risk! :-]

After all, if you're passing around insider trading info, do you want
everyone at any random network site to have a chance to scan it?

A related topic that I haven't heard discussed:  We have some uucp
links that are internal to the company, and are rather expensive 
long-distance calls.  For company business, it is often a good 
idea to encourage their use.  It's easier to uucp a big chunk of
source code across a phone line than it is to mess with tapes or
floppies, and it gets the job done much faster.  But management
has some reasonable concerns that the outside world start using
these links for mail.  

The question is what sort of cost we attribute to such links.  For
internal mail, we'd like to make them look cheap, so that company
communication be fast.  To outsiders, we'd like to make them look
expensive.  

So far, the approach has been to tell the outside world that they
either don't exist or are very expensive.  Internally, we aren't
using a routing mailer, so it's no problem yet.  With the existing
routers, it looks like we'd have to have two sets of records (just
like the accounting department :-), an internal set that makes the
links cheap and an external set that makes them expensive.  This
seems undesirable; one of them has to be incorrect, and it'd be 
hard to prevent them from being accidentally 'corrected' to agree 
with each other.

Any good ideas?  Any ideas at all?  Has this already been hashed 
out?  If so, can someone email me the general solution?

-- 
	John M Chambers			Phone: 617/364-2000x7304
Email: ...{adelie,bu-cs,harvax,inmet,mcsbos,mit-eddie,mot[bos]}!cdx39!{jc,news,root,usenet,uucp}
Smail: Codex Corporation; Mailstop C1-30; 20 Cabot Blvd; Mansfield MA 02048-1193
Clever-Saying: If we can't fix it, it ain't broke.