Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!rutgers!husc6!seismo!hao!woods From: woods@hao.UUCP Newsgroups: news.sysadmin Subject: Re: mailers Message-ID: <554@hao.UCAR.EDU> Date: Fri, 27-Feb-87 16:26:27 EST Article-I.D.: hao.554 Posted: Fri Feb 27 16:26:27 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 1-Mar-87 11:31:55 EST References: <2131@ncoast.UUCP> Reply-To: woods@hao.UUCP (Greg Woods) Distribution: na Organization: High Altitude Obs./NCAR, Boulder CO Lines: 50 Summary: It's being done In article <2131@ncoast.UUCP> wb8foz@ncoast.UUCP (David Lesher) writes: > > I would have mailed but my mailer choked..... > > Now the same thing often happens to me, so I can appreciate > the state of mind of the poster. But it is very wasteful of > net.money to go through this. My question is: would it not > be worthwhile to devote some fraction of net.genuis/net.GOD > (s) resources to inventing better, more dependable, mailers? Yes, it certainly would, which is why it is being done. It's called domains. I have heard people say that the very idea of domains is the reason why we're seeing so many failures. I do not happen to agree with this point of view. I think the reason we're seeing so many failures is because we are in the middle of a period of rapid change in the way uucp mail gets delivered. Some sites implement domain-based addressing, and others don't. As more and more sites move to domain-based routing, mail will become more reliable. Dave Taylor pointed out some problems with routing based on static information. He is correct in noting that the routing breaks down when that information is not correct. Of course, that's no problem; you site admins out there ARE updating your pathalias database promptly when the mod.map postings come out, right? :-) This is as close to dynamic routing information as we are going to get with uucp technology. If you don't want to maintain routing tables, I see nothing wrong with Dave's suggestion to simply send messages you can't route directly to a site which DOES maintain routing tables. This can be done with sendmail (by defining a major relay host, and sending any unresolved addresses to that host at the end of ruleset 0). With a little work, you could probably get it to work with the major relay host actually being a uucp path. If you don't have sendmail, you could use smail(8) (and presumably the "uumail" I've heard about on the net but never seen) to do this. Just create a very simple phony paths file that routes all top-level domains to some "smart" host (e.g., a bunch of lines like .COM pathtoseismo!%s would do it). (For smail, make sure the file is run through sort -f first). For netnews software, this capability is already implemented in 2.11 with the "mailpaths" file. Define "internet" to be a path to a "smart" host, and that takes care of that. Mail replies to the From: line in domain form get sent to that host for delivery. We're getting there, but all the bugs are not out, and all the old software out there has not yet been replaced with newer software that is designed for domains (insert plug for 2.11 here). --Greg -- UUCP: {hplabs, seismo, nbires, noao}!hao!woods CSNET: woods@ncar.csnet ARPA: woods%ncar@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA INTERNET: woods@hao.ucar.edu