Xref: utzoo comp.mail.uucp:1696 comp.mail.headers:400 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!agate!ucbvax!hplabs!hpda!hptsug2!taylor@hplabs.hp.com From: taylor@hplabs.hp.com (Dave Taylor) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,comp.mail.headers Subject: Re: Eliot Lear's final words aren't about this problem Message-ID: <432@hptsug2.HP.COM> Date: 18 Aug 88 05:40:13 GMT References: <34@volition.dec.com> Sender: taylor@hptsug2.HP.COM Organization: Hewlett-Packard University Grants Program Lines: 37 Paul Vixie replies to a comment of Eliot Lear with: > The person you need to yell at for this offense is Dave Taylor. ELM is the > only user agent I know of that has an option for automatic source routing. Yo! Vixie! Yer wrong, mon! The gig here is that software should be concerned with the *user* not the *specification* or the *machine*. Elm (not ELM) has the builtin hooks to pathalias and the domain rewrite database because it's something that *users need* (caveat: most sites can rephrase that as `needed' instead, but there are still leaf Unix nodes on the periphery...). I don't know, this is a pretty serious issue, actually. I guess we're just disagreeing on some fundamental issues here, that of the system modifying its behaviour to match the needs and expectations of the user, or vice versa. The counter-example, one that happens with `lower level routing', is that you send mail to a host and accidentally mistype the hostname. You have to wait for your system to choke on it and return it as a dead letter before you are notified something is wrong. That's wrong. In the same way, sendmail is *not* the right place to have personal aliases -- if I want to be able to send mail to "vixie" from my computer, I should *not* have an alias in the /usr/lib/aliases file "vixie:vixie@DEC". That's too far down, and too late for the cognitive process of composing and sending a message. I want to know IMMEDIATELY that if I type in 'vixe' instead, it's wrong. Comments? -- Dave Taylor