Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!bu-cs!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!tytso
From: tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Re: mail headers
Message-ID: <10766@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Date: 22 Apr 89 19:53:09 GMT
References: <841@aber-cs.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o)
Distribution: eunet,world
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lines: 33

In article <841@aber-cs.UUCP> pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
>Again on smart routing! Actually, even UUCP routes need not be source routes;
>you can always leave them udnerspecified, if you feel like it, and let
>the MTAs at yours and other sites flesh them out. It has been a long
>time since users have been required to type themselves the routes. Nowadays,
>even on UUCP only machines, they type dest!user or use@dest, and the MTAs
>generate the route.

Perhaps I'm being confused, but I was under the impression that "most"
UUCP sites do not handle smart routing; that most sites did not run
pathalias or something like it, so that if you sent mail to b!d!f, and
site b did not talk directly to site d, it would normally bounce.

Thus sites like ihnp4 (before it got shutdown) were "used" as smart
routers to generate uucp routes becuase most sites couldn't do it on
their own.  That was why I made the statement I did that UUCP does
_not_ do smart routing, and that you _do_ need to give a fully
specified route, since you can't depend on sites running a smart uucp
mailer.

Is this still true, or do most people really use a smart mailer that
can figure out routes these days?  Send responses to me, and I will
summarize.

BTW, for sites that do use pathalias, I completely agree with you that
MTA should _never_ try to rewrite paths.  However, saying that seems
to do as much good as proclaiming that mailers should never rewrite
From: addresses or that people should not use the Path: line found in
news articles for mail purposes.....
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Theodore Ts'o				bloom-beacon!mit-athena!tytso
3 Ames St., Cambridge, MA 02139		tytso@athena.mit.edu
   Everybody's playing the game, but nobody's rules are the same!