Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!im4u!woton!riddle
From: riddle@woton.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle )
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: smail doesn't like UUCP hostnames containing periods
Keywords: smail, uucp, domain-style names
Message-ID: <1066@woton.UUCP>
Date: 26 May 88 17:27:10 GMT
Organization: Shriners Burns Institute, Galveston
Lines: 30
Smart-Guest: "Bob"

I've just been informed that woton's principal UUCP partner is about to
change its UUCP name from "im4u" to "cs.utexas.edu".  Apparently this
will break smail: in experiments I've tried so far, addresses in the
form "cs.utexas.edu!user" fail to resolve properly and smail attempts a
delivery to "user" on my local system. 

Unless I'm mistaken this happens because smail considers anything
containing a period to be a domain rather than a proper UUCP host and
refuses to resolve to a UUCP address that starts with it. 

Here's the pertinent portion of our old "paths" file:

		im4u	im4u!%s
		smart-host	im4u!%s
		woton	%s

Here's what I've tried to replace it with, without success:

		cs.utexas.edu	cs.utexas.edu!%s
		im4u	cs.utexas.edu!%s
		smart-host	cs.utexas.edu!%s
		woton	%s

Short of persuading our UUCP partner to go by something without periods
(such as a simple "cs"), can anyone suggest a fix or workaround for this
problem?  Thanks.

-- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
-- Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer.
-- riddle%woton.uucp@cs.utexas.edu  uunet!ut-sally!cs.utexas.edu!woton!riddle