Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!accuvax.nwu.edu!nucsrl!gore
From: gore@eecs.nwu.edu (Jacob Gore)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Domain Registration (was Re: rewriting FROM: lines)
Message-ID: <3400012@eecs.nwu.edu>
Date: 27 May 89 22:24:47 GMT
References: <5794@microsoft.UUCP>
Organization: Northwestern U, Evanston IL, USA
Lines: 68

/ comp.mail.uucp / les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) / May 26, 1989 /
>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?
>... an address like:
>  a!x.y.z!b!you  (replace ! with your favorite character)

(That's not an address, it's the end of a path.  Your correspondent would
still need to figure out how to get to 'a'.)

>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,

HOLD IT -- how does 'x.y.z' "know about" 'b' if 'b' is not in the maps?

>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.

On the contrary.  If 'b' is my (God forbid :-) PC, and I move its
connection to a place where it's no longer forwarded to by x.y.z, but by
l.m.n, then I have to tell everybody who writes to me to stop using
  you-figure-out-what-goes-here!x.y.x!b!me
and start using
  you-figure-out-what-goes-here-instead!l.m.n!b!me

If I call it 'b.c' instead and register it with the domain name service, I
just need to tell whatever nameserver on the net is handling the '.c'
domain the new information.  'me@b.c' before the move, 'me@b.c' after the
move. 

>A FROM: line line x.y.z!a!me 
>could then be replied to from anywhere. 

Unless 'a' itself moves to where 'x.y.z' no longer forwards to it, and
'q.r.s' is doing it instead.

>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.  

"THE domain nameserver"?  The Internet nameservers (that's plural, very
plural) form a distributed database.  Their only purpose is to store this
"knowledge" that you seem to expect some "smart hosts" to acquire out of
nowhere (about sites that are not listed in any registry, such as the name
service database or the UUCP maps).

Name servers don't forward mail.  They only provide answers about how to
deliver mail to a given address.  They don't "get stuck" with providing
name service -- they exist for that purpose.  They have nothing to do with
the actual transfer of mail -- they just provide information about which
host will accept (and, if necessary, forward) mail for a specific address.

The domain naming scheme is there to make it possible to have a distributed
(as opposed to simply duplicated) database.  You say that 'x.y.z' knows
about 'b'?  Fine.  Then you have two options: give 'b' a domain name so
that 'x.y.z' can share that knowledge with other sites, or you go and
share it with every one of your correspondents.

Personally, I prefer giving people an address that they can send to, without
having to figure out the route for the message to take.  All I ask of mail
systems is to deliver it faithfully to me, and not muck with my return
address when the message is from me to somebody else.

Jacob Gore				Gore@EECS.NWU.Edu
Northwestern Univ., EECS Dept.		{oddjob,chinet,att}!nucsrl!gore