Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 (MC840302); site mcvax.UUCP
Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!mcvax!piet
From: piet@mcvax.UUCP (Piet Beertema)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: parsing host1!user@host2 - a new idea
Message-ID: <6109@mcvax.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 19-Oct-84 07:48:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: mcvax.6109
Posted: Fri Oct 19 07:48:25 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 20-Oct-84 07:05:33 EDT
References: <691@sunybcs.UUCP> <1606@nsc.UUCP> <1608@nsc.UUCP> <842@dual.UUCP>
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 36

<...>

	>I'm about ready to bring up sendmail here at DUAL, and my rules of
	>thumb are quite simple:
	>1.	When you're on the ARPA INTERNET, obey RFC822 exactly
	>		(i.e. `@' takes precedence).
	>2.	When you're on the UUCP network, obey UUCP bangist conventions
	>		(i.e. `!' takes precedence).
	>3.	Rule 1 takes precedence over Rule 2.
Simple solutions sometimes work very good.... Yes, I strongly agree with
the given parsing, especially in relation with pathaliasing:

It seems there are quite some pathalias versions around, the latest one being
the Peter SteveMark (:-)) one. However some articles about these pathaliases
indicate that people see it as a user interface that should be installed on
every site ("what use is a pathalias that runs only on 32-bit machines?").
I strongly object to that view. Pathaliasing requires a database that should
be maintained on a high-priority level; and you can't expect that from all
sites.
Thus pathaliasing should be done only by backbone or whatever-you-may-call-them
sites and be fully transparent to the users both on the backbone site and on
the leaf nodes; therefore pathaliasing (routing) should be linked to sendmail.
This means that at any site you should be able to have a mail routed by
the nearest backbone site; and since lots of sites don't run sendmail, the
bang convention should/can be used to get the mail to the backbone. Thus a user
could say: "mail path!backbone!user@site.domain" where "path" is the path to
the backbone. That means that on all intermediate hops the '!' should have
precedence over the '@'; only the backbone site will expand (if necessary)
the remaining part using pathaliasing. A backbone should also know/add a path
to a given network gateway if necessary and convert to the proper syntax.

In fact the above scheme has been operating satisfactorily for more than
a year now here at mcvax.
-- 
	Piet Beertema, CWI, Amsterdam
	...{decvax,philabs}!mcvax!piet