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Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!lll-lcc!mordor!styx!lognet2!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!amdcad!phil
From: phil@amdcad.UUCP (Phil Ngai)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.headers,comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: smail
Message-ID: <14308@amdcad.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 14-Jan-87 01:52:47 EST
Article-I.D.: amdcad.14308
Posted: Wed Jan 14 01:52:47 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 14-Jan-87 19:32:28 EST
References: <14227@amdcad.UUCP> <3232@cbosgd.ATT.COM> <1442@blia.BLI.COM> <7534@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Reply-To: phil@amdcad.UUCP (Phil Ngai)
Organization: Advanced Micro Devices, Sunnyvale, California
Lines: 43
Keywords: decwrl, UUCP novice
Xref: mnetor comp.mail.headers:83 comp.mail.uucp:137

In article <7534@decwrl.DEC.COM> reid@decwrl.UUCP (Brian Reid) writes:
>
>decwrl is a USENET backbone site. USENET does not necessarily have anything
>at all to do with uucp. We also happen to be a major uucp hub in Silicon
>Valley, and we have several people who put a lot of work into making sure
>that decwrl works smoothly for uucp.
{Yes, decwrl is a major uucp hub and things in general work very
smoothly.  I am grateful for the services that decwrl provides.

>I suspect that the reason Mark thinks that we think we are not a serious uucp
>site is that we choose not to perform automatic routing.   We refuse to
>process addresses of the form foo@baz.UUCP. This is a conscious decision on
>our part, based on our observations that the automatic routing database has a
>lot of garbage in it, and that it will frequently route messages into
>hyperspace.

I would like to make a plea here. I hope I'm not carrying coal to
Newcastle; decwrl is very well run and you probably know these things
already.  But there are people who don't and I think it's an important topic.

Please, don't ever reroute uucp routed addresses of the form a!b!c.
Please don't even shorten things like a!b!c to b!c where b is a site
you know you connect to directly.  This takes away the ability to test
uucp links. And in my experience, the testability of a network is
essential to keeping it running. It also takes away the ability to
explicitly route around something known to have problems.

It is appropriate to route domain addresses such as
phil@neptune.amd.com.  In the first place, you have to. In the second
place, such addresses are fair game.

Let's try to maintain two classes of addresses, ones which are
eligible for routing and ones which should be handled strictly as
specified by the sender.

By the way, Brian, if you don't route foo@baz.UUCP, what do you do
with it? Drop it, bounce it, or something else?
-- 
 My left foot is digital, my right foot is analog. 

 Phil Ngai +1 408 749 5720
 UUCP: {ucbvax,decwrl,hplabs,allegra}!amdcad!phil
 ARPA: amdcad!phil@decwrl.dec.com