Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!pyrdc!pyrnj!rutgers!att!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: active rerouting
Message-ID: <6581@chinet.UUCP>
Date: 14 Sep 88 14:29:20 GMT
References: <4740@b-tech.UUCP> <4747@b-tech.UUCP> <4748@b-tech.UUCP> <4753@b-tech.UUCP> <1426@ficc.uu.net> <6548@chinet.UUCP> <16129@onfcanim.UUCP>
Reply-To: les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 28

In article <16129@onfcanim.UUCP> dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale) writes:

>>Then news software running on machines that do not have the map data could
>>pass replies off to the nearest site that knows how to route it. There are
>>currently ways of making this happen, but they are not standardized and may
>>depend on interpretation by intermediate sites. 

>This is exactly what happens if you define INTERNET when you compile
>B news, and then set up "internet" in /usr/lib/news/mailpaths to
>point to a machine that will handle Internet-style addresses
>and is willing to do this for you.
>
>This works pretty well - we used it for a year here until I finally got around to
>installing smail.

Yes, it can be done now, but as I understand things, the kludge that you
use to pass the combination route/address depends on the parsing by the
intermediate sites.  RFC976 states that uucp gateways are supposed to
take domain.dom!user and treat it like user@domain.dom, but if the site
that you want to do the routing is not your uucp neighbor, then you need
to know how to pass the request through the subsequent sites. Suppose
you want siteC to route  siteA!siteB!siteC!domain.dom!user or
siteA!siteB!siteC!user@domain.dom.  SiteA is your uucp neighbor which
you would obviously know about.  Doesn't this depend on siteB also
using uucp style forwarding which could easily change without your
knowledge since it is not a direct contact?

Les Mikesell