Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Routing mail through Digital's sites Message-ID: <10022@e.ms.uky.edu> Date: 22 Jul 88 01:32:50 GMT References: <616@bacchus.DEC.COM> <10005@e.ms.uky.edu> <4930@zodiac.UUCP> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Distribution: na Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 56 In article <4930@zodiac.UUCP> jordan@ads.com (Jordan Hayes) writes: >David Herron comments on Brian Reid's > assertion that "This kind of pseudo-AI belongs in >user agents, not transport.": > > "That's a matter of opinion ..." > >I guess, 4 years later, i've still not seen good justification for >what David is implying ... > >/jordan ok, I am assuming that Brian meant to say that he always wants to compute his own UUCP paths out to the n-th degree. That is, if he wants to send mail to someone in Europe, he figures out the path over to uunet, then from mcvax to wherever it needs to go. [I picked a worse case on purpose]. Maybe that's not what he meant but that's how I took it. Gack! I don't like figuring routes out. That's what computers are for, remembering stupid little things like that. Unfortunately we've got a huge network that's hard to keep track of so I can't do the ideal situation here (simply say user@place and let the mail system take care of it) so I have to provide hooks to let people route their own stuff. But I give them as much help as I can by keeping an up-to-date routing database and routing on the first listed node in the path. well whatever. we all know that there's a good fight contained in this argument and we all know that there are a number of camps which won't come to terms on it ... my opinion is that end users want to have as simple a system to use as is possible. that means, to me, they should be able to utter something like user@place and let the mail system figure the rest out. now. about whether to put routing intelligence into the user-agent or not? why in the world would you want to do that? I don't like the ucbmail (mailx/Mail; /usr/src/ucb/Mail) interface. Now, it takes a fair bit of work to get routing intelligence working right -- especially to the level that peter has in his user agent. If the world requires routing intelligence in the user agent, ok, but EVERY user agent needs to have the same level of intelligence. I gaurantee you that will not happen though, because not every writer of a user agent has the same amount of time to put into things -- not all of them are interested in routing problems either. after 4 years of playing with mail systems I don't see any good justification for what Brian is apparently asserting, and if I've got the assertions down right, what you are asserting either Jordan. -- <---- David Herron -- The E-Mail guy <---- ska: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <---- A misplaced Kansan trapped in the heart of Kentucky, <---- the state where it is now illegal to water your lawn on the wrong day.