Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!oliveb!pyramid!voder!tolerant!vsi1!lmb
From: lmb@vsi1.UUCP (Larry Blair)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Rerouting of explicit paths
Message-ID: <327@vsi1.UUCP>
Date: 4 Mar 88 21:05:56 GMT
Organization: VICOM Systems Inc., San Jose, CA
Lines: 23

I am not in favor of rerouting a local user's explicit path for several well
known reasons, the greatest of which are that you can't avoid a temporarily
dead host and that when someone's local machine matches a name in the maps,
you simply CAN'T mail to them.

(FLAME ON!)
As far as rerouting mail sent through your site goes, this should be considered
to be a no-no subject to immediate de-netting!  A user several hops away has
no way to know that you are going to screw up his path.  If someone routing
through your machine wants to generate a 20 hop path, that's his business, not
yours.

I propose that a new field be added to the map entry where sites that reroute
other people's mail indicate so.  Pathalias should be changed to accept an
option that only uses these sites as a last resort (since I found out that
rutgers is rerouting, I changed their map entry to show all their connections
as DEAD).

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*   *   O     Larry Blair
  *   *   O   VICOM Systems Inc.     sun!pyramid----\
    *   *   O 2520 Junction Ave.     uunet!ubvax----->!vsi1!lmb
  *   *   O   San Jose, CA  95134    ucbvax!tolerant/
*   *   O     +1-408-432-8660