Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!minya!jc
From: jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Rerouting of explicit paths
Message-ID: <479@minya.UUCP>
Date: 10 Mar 88 16:35:31 GMT
References: <701@l.cc.purdue.edu> <1642@uhccux.UUCP>
Distribution: na
Organization: home
Lines: 55

In article <1642@uhccux.UUCP>, lee@uhccux.UUCP (Greg Lee) writes:
> There was also a discussion of rerouting bang paths a few months ago.
> Then, as now, there seemed to be a consensus that it ought not be done.
> But it still is done -- how come?  

Simple - because there are lots of mailers lurking around that don't
follow the concensus thought.  I have some sympathy here, since I've
been trying to find out how to make sendmail behave correctly on quite
a few systems.  There are many mail packages out there that are being
run by people (like myself) that only partially understand them, and
they can often be made to behave sanely only on a statistical basis.
(If it works most of the time, don't touch it!)  Queries to "experts"
tend to produce lots of arrogant insults, which doesn't help matters
at all.  Eventually we'll probably have some self-installing and
self-correcting packages.  For the present, when you submit your
mail to the network, it is ending up in the jaws of lots of semi-
tamed mailers whose behavior is as puzzling to the owners of the
machines as it is to you and me and other mere humans.

>				There are some sites I cannot mail
> to, and when the mail is returned, the header shows a routing that
> bears no resemblance to the one I requested, and that routing always
> went though rutgers.  Since the path I specify is ignored, I can't
> seem to avoid rutgers, either.  Very frustrating.  

Around here, we have a lot of very similar problems with mail that
stops off at harvard.  I get lots of mail that came to me via paths
like ...!harvard!mit-eddie!harvard!foo!harvard!bar!adelie!minya!jc.
The nice thing here is to note that mit-eddie!minya is a uucp link.
The map entries show both that link and adelie!minya to be DAILY, 
so it's not clear why eddie bounces it back to harvard.  I've brought
it up with those machines' postmasters, but they are very busy.

In almost all cases, the mail would have been much faster if it had
avoided harvard and used the original path.  But harvard advertises
itself (via its map listing) as a fast path to lots of machines, so
lots of mail gets forwarded there.

I know for a fact that a lot of mail directed my way has disappeared,
never to be seen again.  I've also sent myself mail from various of
the places I've worked, and seen a week or two of wandering all over 
the world, all documented in the header.  (If I could only travel so 
easily!)  If anyone out there has written to me in the last couple
of weeks, and not received a response, you might try again...

If we have patience, but keep harassing the culprits who foist these
"intelligent" mailers on us, maybe eventually we'll have something
that works.	

Of course, just about then, IBM will release a new package that will
be installed on half the PCs in the world and will randomly misroute
anything to/from non-IBM systems.  (:-)

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