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From: egisin@waterloo.edu (Eric Gisin)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: dynamic routing for UUCP mail
Message-ID: <10149@orchid.waterloo.edu>
Date: Sat, 8-Aug-87 09:50:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: orchid.10149
Posted: Sat Aug  8 09:50:41 1987
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|Now consider that we have reached a Catch-22: the general consensus has been
|reached that if an incoming `rmail' invocation contains a qualified bang
|path, then one should not re-route it, and we should assume that the 
|raison-d'etre for the full bang path was that the originator knew where
|he/she wished the mail route to take.  Meanwhile, I was just struck with
|the rememberance that one of the reasons for the development of smart
|mailers in the first place was to get around the fact that replies to news
|articles were using the incoming Path: to generate the return path, which
|thus occasionally became many, many hostnames long!!  Using smart mailers
|enabled using the From: line to generate single RFC822 `user@host.UUCP' or
|`user@some.do.MAIN' paths.  Now, the sentiment for `leaving bang paths alone'
|is all well and good; but given that replies to Usenet news articles probably
|account for a healthy proportion of mail traffic, it seems that taking this
|attitude isn't really doing any good in the long run.  6 of one, half a dozen
|of the other as the saying goes ...
|
|No, I don't have any solutions, either.  Just thought I'd point this out.

Is there any need to support the reply-to-Path mechanism of news anymore?
I'm assuming sites without a smart mailer are small and have one uucp link
to the outside world and a few local links. Is that reasonable?
I think anyone with a number of long-distance links would install
a smart mailer for the obvious economic benefits.

If my assumption is correct, a simple mailer could be put into
future news readers that used the From: address. It would only have
to recognize local domains (or local-host.uucp), and pass everything
thing else to link-to-rest-of-world!domain!user. Of course that
assumes link-to-rest-of-world, or someone down the way, is running
smail or some other domain mailer.

I'm probably being overly optimistic that most major sites
running a domain mailer.