Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!necntc!linus!heart-of-gold!jc
From: jc@heart-of-gold (John M Chambers x7780 1E342)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Rerouting of explicit paths
Message-ID: <128@heart-of-gold>
Date: 18 Mar 88 21:14:40 GMT
References: <327@vsi1.UUCP> <9@tness7.UUCP> <3544@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> <410@ontenv.UUCP>
Organization: Mitre Corp, Bedford, MA, USA
Lines: 35

In article <410@ontenv.UUCP>, soley@ontenv.UUCP (Norman S. Soley) writes:
> In article <11@tness7.UUCP>, mechjgh@tness7.UUCP (Greg Hackney ) writes:
> > About rerouting....
> > 
> > If most of the sites did rerouting, a lot of time and money
> > would be saved in my opinion. 
> 
> A lot more time and money would be saved if everybody used news
> compiled with INTERNET defined. Let's deal with the problem at it's 
> source instead of applying a fix afterward.  ...

Well, I tried that on this machine, which has only SMTP connections, and
a couple of fairly intelligent mail systems nearby.  The result?  EVERY
response bounced back because of unknown hosts.  Not even a single success
that I could find.

So I tried recompiling with INTERNET not defined.  The result?  Not a single
failure since then that I've seen (and I should know, as Postmaster's mail
gets forwarded to me).

It's been said that something that works is preferable to something that
fails.  It's even more true that something that always works is preferable
to something that always fails.  (:-)

In my experience, re-routing of explicit paths is the expensive choice.
It replaces relatively cheap machine time with more expensive human time
in handling all the failures.  There's also the ill will it generates 
among the poor non-email-gurus that try using the system.  That's the
really expensive part.  After a user has tried email a few times, and 
gotten half the messages back preceded by two pages of gobbledygook that
include confusing error messages, most of them decide to go back to the
bad old smail until email starts working better.  It's often real hard
to convince them that they should try again, especially when they try
just one message, and it gets returned.

Sigh.