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Path: utzoo!mnetor!yetti!geac!daveb
From: daveb@geac.UUCP (Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: routing in the user agent
Message-ID: <1492@geac.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 28-Sep-87 08:48:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: geac.1492
Posted: Mon Sep 28 08:48:15 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 29-Sep-87 01:20:28 EDT
References: <7333@e.ms.uky.edu> <1631@umix.cc.umich.edu> <1758@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Reply-To: daveb@geac.UUCP (Dave Collier-Brown)
Organization: The little blue rock next to that twinkly star.
Lines: 32

In article <1758@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> greg@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM
| (Greg Noel) writes:  I think you are both right and both wrong.  There
| are certainly some aspects of generating a valid return address that
| belong in the user agent, including inspecting the path that the the
| router proposes to use, but on the other hand, I don't think that the
| user agent is the right place for making the actual routing decisions.
| That should be done by an agent of the system administrator (or other
| management) as they are the ones that should have the final say in
| allocating the resources.

  Well, when Honeywell was putting up an (SMTP based) mailer on one of
their lines of machines this very question came up.  Domains weren'
tquite working ((:-)), and the routing was passed off to a logically
separate entity, the "Network Host and Domain Table", which in this
case really was a table.  A seperate "User Oracle" was in charge of
the table, and could be asked for domain, identification, routing and
delivery information by the user agent, the transfer agent, the
administrator or the client.

  It sorta worked REAL GOOD.

--dave

reference: Stachour et all, "GCOS Internet Mail Project Internal
Documentation", Mineapolis, MN (Honeywell Corp. Computer Sci. Centre),
1983. [Stachour@Hi-Multics.ARPA]

-- 
 David Collier-Brown.                 {mnetor|yetti|utgpu}!geac!daveb
 Geac Computers International Inc.,   |  Computer Science loses its
 350 Steelcase Road,Markham, Ontario, |  memory (if not its mind)
 CANADA, L3R 1B3 (416) 475-0525 x3279 |  every 6 months.