Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!purdue!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: this might be getting out of hand...
Message-ID: <3670@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 17 Aug 88 03:40:54 GMT
References: <3746@palo-alto.DEC.COM> <3400004@eecs.nwu.edu> <12246@ncoast.UUCP>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 21

In article <12246@ncoast.UUCP> allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) writes:
>But domain-based (i.e. Internet non-UUCP) mailers do not use routing, so
>they must know the actual destination site!

This restriction has always puzzled me.  If you're sending mail to
u@A.B.C.D.E, why should the server for E care about A?  It ought to
hand over the message to a server for D, and so on, until a server for
the B domain gets it and figures out who A is.

For the E server to find a shorter routing, or to send directly to A,
is just an optimization that should be used when possible but not
insisted upon.  I think the Internet has it all wrong.  But then again,
I'm a UUCP user, what do I know?

Can you imagine, the US Post Office returning mail undelivered because
it hasn't heard of some little town in Yugoslavia, rather than simply
handing over the letter to the Yugoslavian Post Office and letting it
figure out where to deliver it?  Postal addresses are domain-based
too.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  !{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi