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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!ll-xn!adelie!minya!jc
From: jc@minya.UUCP (jc)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: routing in the user agent
Message-ID: <278@minya.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 10-Oct-87 15:52:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: minya.278
Posted: Sat Oct 10 15:52:36 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 12-Oct-87 19:18:26 EDT
Organization: home
Lines: 47
Summary: The postman also fails...

> Users should be concerned with addresses and not routes. Do you want to tell the
> postman the exact path he should take in order to deliver your letter? I think
> not. Teach the postman how to do do routing, tell him the address and leave it
> at that.

This turns out to be a real bad example.  Like many people, I have no trouble
coming up with personal cases where the postman screwed up.  For instance, a
couple years back I lived close to a family that had once moved away, to the
other coast in fact, and after a year or so moved back to their original home.
Ten years later, they were still receiving mail that had been noticed by some
diligent postal worker, forwarded to their "new" address across the country,
and then forwarded back.  They brought this to the attention of many, many
people in the Postal Service, to no avail.  The rules said that the changes
of address could only be removed if they were wrong, and the family had in
fact moved just like the records said, so the records had to remain unchanged.

Now, I'm quite certain that everyone in that post office knew exactly what
they were doing, and understood exactly why it was wrong.  But rules is rules.
Do you really think that we are going to have mailers installed that are
more intelligent than this, in our lifetimes?  If you do, hey, I've got a
just slightly used bridge which you may like as an investment opportunity.

Even if you can write such an intelligent forwarder, well, that's fine if
my mail goes through your machine.  But how are you going to stop all those 
organizations out there from installing "standard" mailers that follow the 
rules just like the above-mentioned postal workers, and screw up my mail 
just as badly?

I hope you're not so naive that you expect a standards organization to
come up with a forwarding scheme that works, or that vendors will implement
a standard correctly.

You might not have noticed, but there is a growing population of email
users around who are concluding in a bemused fashion that those email
turkeys will never get their acts together so that email stops bouncing 
half the time.  Perhaps you could get their respect if you gave them a 
way of figuring out a usable path.  True, we'd all like to just stick 
on an address, drop it in the hopper, and trust that the email will go 
through.  But we're not near that yet; most of the problems are caused 
by brain-damaged forwarders all over the network; and correcting it on 
one machine does very little to clear up the problem.

If forwarders will honor absolute bang-paths, and bounce them back if they 
fail, then users will at least have a way out when mail fails. 

-- 
	John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)