Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!alberta!ubc-cs!uw-beaver!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!cbmvax!snark!eric From: eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: using Path: for mail replies Summary: Sorry, I don't plan to eliminate Path lines Message-ID:Date: 21 Aug 88 20:00:03 GMT References: <676@bacchus.dec.com> <881@vsi1.uucp> <10135@e.ms.uky.edu> <60@minya.uucp> <8528@swan.ulowell.edu> <879@ncrcan.toronto.ncr.com> <63@volition.dec.com> Organization: Smash-the-State Leather and Lingerie Boutique Lines: 29 In article <63@volition.dec.com>, vixie@decwrl.dec.com (Paul Vixie) writes: > "Path:" lines should be changed in the next release of B/C/TMN News, so > that they don't look so much like UUCP bang-paths. People get the mistaken > impression that these are useful ways to get mail back to the sender of > an article. In fact, it often works. I understand the problem you've been discussing, but I have rejected (for now) the idea of eliminating Path lines as available for reply generation. Doing so would leave an awful lot of small UUCP-only sites (the ones *not* running smail) in the lurch. I think that whole (anti-Path) line of argument reflects a kind of elitism arising from the fact that most of the mail gurus live at sites with expert sysadmins that are already in the domainist/Internet world. I think it's too easy for such people to slip into forgetting the vast majority of small UUCP-only sites and dismissing their needs and concerns as irrelevant -- but *I* don't intend to. I'm still a small site, working one 1200-baud phone line from a desktop. I run smail but it's easy for me to identify with a lot of people who don't have the experience, or time, or even spare disk space, to find a copy, bring it up and administer it. An alternative I am looking into is bundling the smail software with news and arranging the news autoconfigure/install sequence to also configure and install smail. Then everybody really could use From: and Reply-To: lines exclusively.-- Eric S. Raymond (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews) UUCP: ..!{uunet,att,rutgers!vu-vlsi}!snark!eric @nets: eric@snark.UUCP Post: 22 South Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355 Phone: (215)-296-5718