Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: UUCP Addresses
Message-ID: <1990Feb4.004757.11546@twwells.com>
Date: 4 Feb 90 00:47:57 GMT
References: <7419@tank.uchicago.edu>
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Lines: 84

In article <7419@tank.uchicago.edu> jill@tank.uchicago.edu (jill holly hansen) writes:
: This question has probably been asked many times, but please, I'm new
: here.

That *is* what this newsgroup is for. :-)

: I understand that the UUCP extension on addresses is obsolete. For
: example, I can't respond to a posting from someone such as
: xxx@whatever.UUCP without changing it to xxx@whatever.UU.net.

This is only partly true. The .UUCP extension, as I understand
it, is an idea that failed. However, many people still use it.
There is quite a bit of pressure to eliminate the use of .UUCP,
but it isn't likely to disappear for some time.

Now, if you get an address of the form: xxx@whatever.UUCP, that
is supposed to mean that `whatever' has registered themselves in
the maps. (Actually, I believe that the original idea was that
they were known to someone designated as a uucp gateway, but I
think this is no longer true.) Accordingly, you can send mail to
`whatever' by sending it to some site that knows how to look
things up in the maps.

There are a number of possible ways to send off your mail if
xxx@whatever.UUCP doesn't work. You might try any of:

	whatever!xxx

If your site knows how to route uucp mail.

	...!<smart-site>!whatever!xxx

If your site can deal with uucp paths but won't generate them for
you. The ... is a path to <smart-site> and <smart-site> is a site
that knows how to finish the path for you. You get to find out
both a smart site and a route to it. (Ask your system
administrator. If you are the system administrator, you might ask
a system administrator of a site you are connected to.)

	xxx%whatever@some.uucp.gateway

If you know of a uucp gateway that understands the % hack. The
following sites (from a cursory examination of the uucp maps)
advertise themselves as uucp gateways:

	apple cornell decuac gatech harvard mcvax rutgers uunet

(Some of these I know the domain names for, e.g., apple.com,
rutgers.edu, uunet.uu.net. The others should not be hard to find,
if it matters. Of course, these might not understand the % hack.)

(Also, there may be a better way to specifically route mail
through an Internet site, but I don't know it, being a uucp only
site.)

I don't know if you should be using xxx@whatever.uu.net; I've
heard different things about it. On the one hand, they do
advertise themselves as a uucp gateway, so sending to
xxx%whatever@uunet.uu.net might be OK. On the other hand, uunet
is a commercial (though non-profit) site, so abuse of this might
make it go away. To be safe, unless you are a uucp site connected
to uunet or `whatever' is a uucp site connected to uunet, you may
want to avoid using uunet as a gateway.

: My question is simply, why do we continue to get UUCP extensions?  Is
: it the "whatever" machine's fault, or should my machine's copy of
: inews or rn, etc. be able to change UUCP to something proper?

I would say that the most likely reason is that the site which
sent out the news is improperly configured. Rn (patch level 40
and below, I don't know about the latest patches) has the .UUCP
hard coded in it; many people are unaware of this and just let it
slip through. This may be the case for other bits of software as
well.

Accordingly, there is little you can do about the .UUCP stuff
except work around it. One thing you can do is to configure your
mail software to translate .UUCP on outgoing mail to whatever
works. But that is a topic for another newsgroup. (Which depends
on your mail software. Look in comp.mail.*.)

---
Bill                    { uunet | novavax | ankh } !twwells!bill
bill@twwells.com