Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!hedrick
From: hedrick@aramis.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers
Subject: Re: trying multiple addresses
Message-ID: <2974@aramis.rutgers.edu>
Date: 17 Feb 88 04:45:14 GMT
References: <11842@brl-adm.ARPA>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 20

I absolutely agree with Mark Crispin's comments about everybody moving
to domains and not using the NIC host table.  However I thought this
was a reasonable opportunity to mention some bad news.  For the last
couple of months, Rutgers computer science, math, and part of
engineering have been depending entirely upon the domain system.  We
have users who can't receive mail at all unless the sender's machine
can talk to the domain system.  We have been getting serious
complaints from faculty who are unable to get mail back from faculty
at other institutions.  We are now moving back to a system where all
from addresses will involve hosts that appear in the NIC host table.
The problem is that I am unwilling to make innocent bystanders pay the
cost of turkeys elsewhere who haven't implemented domains.  (I checked
the RFC's not long ago.  The deadline was Oct 85.)  I can't even
always get very mad at the system administrators involved.  There are
still vendors who don't support domains.  Unfortunately, nobody is
going to fail to buy a Convex minisupercomputer because their network
software doesn't support domains.  I wish I had a nice solution to put
at the end of this message, but I don't.  We may keep sending some
staff mail from machines that aren't listed in the NIC tables, just so
we still know who to complain about.