Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!tytso From: tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Newsgroups: news.sysadmin Subject: Re: mail headers Message-ID: <10825@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> Date: 25 Apr 89 05:40:43 GMT References: <248.244422A4@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us> <636@dtscp1.UUCP> <1628@ccnysci.UUCP> <641@dtscp1.UUCP> <1989Apr24.203137.5835@utzoo.uucp> Sender: daemon@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU Reply-To: tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lines: 49 In article <1989Apr24.203137.5835@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: >It depends on what you mean by "supplanting"; if you measure it by counting >systems, I think you might be surprised. The trend is clearly that way, >but the uucp world has a huge head start in sheer number of machines. > ..... >And of course, you Internet folks wouldn't even *consider* accepting some >of the things that make life easier for us uucp folks, in return for all >the extra connectivity *you* now have, even though we are (by some measures >at least) the larger community. Heavens no. We all know that the Internet >is divinely ordained, and all others are inferior heathens. The fact that >the Internet is the smaller of the two groups is totally irrelevant, because >the Internet way of doing things is the One True Way that all should follow. Well, let's see.... doing an analysis of our pathalias output, which is based on all of comp.mail.maps, I get: # sites hops 4 25 ! 188 !! 710 !!! 2043 !!!! 5639 !!!!! 3444 !!!!!! 3631 !!!!!!! 1442 !!!!!!!! 216 !!!!!!!!! 20 !!!!!!!!!! ----- 17,362 uucp mail sites registered in comp.mail.maps Granted, this doesn't get all uucp hosts, since people haven't registered their machines and it doesn't count hosts which are hidden behind another machines. Does anyone have a better figure? The best estimate of the number of Internet sites (which includes Arpanet, NSFnet, etc.) which I have is 56,000. Again, does anybody have a better figure? Given these figures, though, I have to question Henry's statement about the uucp world being a much larger community than the Internet. Even if the Internet is bigger though, it is still not a reason by itself to ignore the needs of the uucp community. It *is* possible to set up your mail system so that the right thing (mostly) happens when gatewaying between the two worlds. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 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!