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