From: utzoo!watmath!bstempleton
Newsgroups: net.mail
Title: Mail addressing rfc819 style
Article-I.D.: watmath.3570
Posted: Fri Oct 1 01:10:58 1982
Received: Fri Oct 1 03:01:21 1982
Ok, let's open the can of worms on this by going over some of the
things that have been discussed.
Ideal: We want mail to people to be based on who they are and where
they are, not as much on what computer they use and certainly
not on what network that computer is on. Thus a geographical
hierarchy based on user@host.domain is something like:
user@.city.province.continent
where a might be a company, or a ward in the
city or a street name or an institution or even, god forbid,
a particular computer. By province, I mean province or state,
shortened to the unique two letter code the post offal has.
ie.
"Brad Templeton@University of Waterloo.Waterloo.Ontario.NA"
for a full designation. (somehow those dots will have to go
by the time this comes, I think all @s is the best and can't
figure why you need two symbols. Naturally, things can get
shorter, and you don't need to use a domain if you are in it.
To somebody in Toronto, I might be:
Brad@UW.waterloo
or to somebody in the states, I might be
Brad@UW.waterloo.ON
This assumes lots of databases and a central authority of some
sort. After all, your machine has to know where to mail to
get to the ON domain, which means there has to be a central machine
for the ON domain. The "UW" machine has to know every person
at UW, but that's not too much to ask. There are problems when
net connectivity is involved, since it's hard to get a central
machine for Massechusets when some machines are on the Arpanet
and others are not. Still that is what it would be nice to
strive for. It's not as hard as it seems, and we can even do
this in most cases on the uucp net. I think we should look into
it. We just need a volunteer machine for each state, which is not
too hard since it is often set up that way right now. If we can't
get this, we can kludge it by having a database that knows that
there is a different way to mail "Columbus.OH" from "Cleveland.OH"
because one is btl and the other is a university. I think it can
be done.
2) For now
At first, I think we just have to set up domains. This is
of course up to the people who own the machines in the domains.
I know here there should not be much problem getting an "ON"
domain as well as a "wat" domain since that's the way it is
mostly set up now. Also, while the "wat" domain might sit in
the "ON" domain, it will also sit probably in the "uucp" domain
for convenience, since this is one of the world's largest cs
universities and there's a lot of traffic. The same will
be true at most other places. Things like time zones don't make
much sense since they're even harder to coordinate than states.
After all, if a domain is to mean anything without databases
getting extremely complex, a domain has to mean a program on
a specific machine that knows how to decode the inner address
below the domain. Essentially if a "btl" domain exists, there
has to be a "btl" machine (perhaps not its name as far as users
are concerned) that can decode foobar.btl for you. Thus domains
turn the net into more of a tree.
In certain cases, for efficiency, we will have to kludge it up
a bit. For example, the "uucp" domain (which will mean nothing
to our machines, they will strip it off) will have to represent
calling a certain program on the arpanet. Chances are that this
will be at Berkeley. Of course, there are several gateway type
nodes around, so we'll have to have some smarts that say that
certain sites ought to get their mail out of cca, sri-unix or
nprdc. If you are the arpanet, they can probably arrange to have
the database on every machine that knows this, or they can keep
it all at berkeley.
The questions remain. What domains are we going to set up? Who is willing
to set one up and handle the database for that domain? If set up properly,
each machine has to only know mappings for a few domains. These are the
global ones such as "arpa" and "csnet", plus any sibling domains to its
own domain[s]. In the case above, every machine need simply know a routing
for the institutions in its city, the cities in its province and the 60 odd
states, provinces and territories. For now, as the net is small, even
less must be known. A lot of this information can be machine generated
for one site in a domain by any other, so there is not a lot of work in
maintaining it. This is what I would like to strive for.
A final note: I suspect that we will have to tack a "root" on to the
end of domain strings to keep things unique. I propose this root be the
null string. This way there are no reserved names in the internet. With
this system, I am bstempleton@watmath.uucp. (note the trailing dot)
If this is installed, then there could even be a local domain called
"uucp" anywhere, since it can be distinguished from the big one by not
having the root character after it. Ie. user@blat.uucp might expand to
user@blat.uucp.btl.uucp. in the final sense, while user@blat.uucp. is
a final string.
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This is the first set of comments. More to come. Discussion is invited.