Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!att!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: rewriting FROM: lines
Message-ID: <8560@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 26 May 89 19:17:06 GMT
References: <31051@sri-unix.SRI.COM> <160@zebra.UUCP> <8535@chinet.chi.il.us> <241@jetson.UPMA.MD.US>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 31

In article <241@jetson.UPMA.MD.US> john@jetson.UPMA.MD.US (John Owens) writes:

>> The real problem is that there is no standard way to let another machine
>> route and forward mail for you.

>Sure there is.

No, I said *standard* way.  There are ways that work at least for sending
but you need to know something about the machines.  Smail passing off
to a smart host works fine for sending, but how does a recipient, perhaps
on BITNET, get a response back to you if you aren't in the maps?  What
I'd like to see is an address that allows one or perhaps two hops
on either end of a site with a domain listing.  That is, an address
like:
  a!x.y.z!b!you  (replace ! with your favorite character)
would mean for the local machine to send to machine a (which it must
know about).  Machine a forwards to x.y.z by its choice of methods.
Machine x.y.z forwards to the machine b that it knows about, and
machine b delivers to user you.

This approach would avoid the necessity to track the transient connections
of every PC running uupc in the world yet allow the stable machines
to optimize routing to each other.  A FROM: line line x.y.z!a!me
could then be replied to from anywhere. 

I suspect that it is intentionally not done this way because the domain
nameserver would automatically get stuck with providing name service and/or
forwarding for anything that connects downstream without having the
control process of putting the machine in the domain.  

Les Mikesell