Xref: utzoo comp.mail.uucp:1605 comp.mail.headers:385 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!mailrus!ncar!husc6!bu-cs!jsol From: jsol@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jon Solomon) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,comp.mail.headers Subject: Re: Real data to support my claim that '-d sun' is the way to go. Message-ID: <24387@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Date: 11 Aug 88 19:43:53 GMT References: <3703@palo-alto.DEC.COM> <10139@g.ms.uky.edu> <3721@palo-alto.DEC.COM> <10141@g.ms.uky.edu> <63372@sun.uucp> <10145@g.ms.uky.edu> Reply-To: jsol@buita.bu.edu (Jon Solomon) Followup-To: comp.mail.uucp Organization: Boston Univ. Lines: 64 I just want to put my two cents worth into this discussion. In the current internet (little "i" internet means everybody, Capital "I" Internet means DARPA blessed sites), we cannot reasonably satisfy everyone's complaints about mail header munging. About the only thing that is agreed upon is that some mailers have to rewrite headers or they get into some form of trouble. The most responsible thing you can do is to minimize the trouble. A user of mine got a message from a site: texfoo.crl (I'm paraphrasing, I don't remember the exact site). Clearly the people on this site prefer to hide the domain system from their users, but they neglect to add the appropriate finishing touches (.com, tektronix.com or whatever is right -- I don't know, all I could do is give my user a guess at what I thought it was). Like Bill Nowicki, my site sends out alot of mail every day. Most of it goes to either Internet (large I Internet) or BITNET sites. We have rewriting rules which make this task easy. Also, no header rewriting needs to be done. We have sites on campus which use uucp, but they conform to the domain system addressing scheme and that makes our rewriting lives easier (we don't have to in their case). As more and more uucp sites come up, and their interdependencies with Internet sites increases, the need for a common naming scheme will be ever-increasing. BUT UNLESS WE ACTUALLY MAKE A CERTAIN NAMING SCHEME LAW WITH ITS APPROPRIATE PROTECTIONS, we have no way of truly enforcing the rules. SO, sendmail rewriters do the best they can. Without legal precidence for naming schemes, we will not be able to fully police the network. Flaming and peer pressure do help, but they are not the complete answer. Only laws and lawyers will really help this sort of thing. Personally, I think Sun is doing a great job forwarding mail. They seem to look at the world from the view that I share, which is that the Internet is the center of the world, and uucp has to eventually conform or be ousted. Think of what chaos there would be if the Internet adopted "bang-style" routing (that is ucbvax.berkeley.edu!bu-it.bu.edu!jsol). The Internet tries to make routing work through the use of domains, and not through the use of address munging. I think the powers that be on the Internet consider header munging a bad idea (I agree). On the other hand, the uucp sites would cry murder if we failed to add "buita!" before the headers we pass to them. They already face a number of problems with address resolution because they aren't a connected-all-the-time network. There is also some rule that says we can't tell others how to do their own internal routing and name resolution. We just have to be sure that they follow the protocol. Which brings up a point, is there an rfc covering how routing should be done in the UUCP world? If not then I think there should be. Flaming at Sun without an RFC to point at is like flaming at the devil. It just won't help. --jsol