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From: lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: more on domains
Message-ID: <847@vortex.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 22-Oct-85 18:52:48 EDT
Article-I.D.: vortex.847
Posted: Tue Oct 22 18:52:48 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 26-Oct-85 03:34:03 EDT
References: <609@down.FUN>
Organization: Vortex Technology, Los Angeles
Lines: 26

I've never said that mail handling REQUIRES knowledge of site "smartness."
However, what I have said is that when you do have information
about the smartness of sites it can allow reasonably intelligent
mail handling without requiring "large" up-to-date databases or complex
(relatively speaking) routing programs.  In fact, with a bit of knowledge
about the smartness of your most important neighbors the total amount
of information you need may be very small overall.

Knowing what you can send, in what form, to each of those
sites can greatly simplify mail decisions.  A site talking
to 40 or 50 other sites can make reasonable decisions about how
to handle a given @ or site.domain!user address with a very short
table and only a few cycles.  It doesn't take a great
number of classifications (but there's more than just "domain" or
"bang" to choose among).  I currently have 3 primary classifications
and about 4 options that can be attached to each of the three main
classes.

I'm not saying that having a full pathparse and mapping database and
similar things doesn't allow equally good or maybe even sometimes
"better" decisions, but, especially on smaller systems and systems
that can't keep up with the mass of changing data for the universe
at large, having information about "the smartness" of sites allows some
useful tradeoffs.

--Lauren--