Xref: utzoo comp.mail.uucp:1603 comp.mail.headers:384 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!gatech!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!k.cc.purdue.edu!l.cc.purdue.edu!cik From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp,comp.mail.headers Subject: Re: what do _YOU_ mean by "all routing"?? Summary: We do not have a good mail system; smart mailers make it worse Message-ID: <866@l.cc.purdue.edu> Date: 11 Aug 88 14:17:43 GMT References: <676@bacchus.DEC.COM> <881@vsi1.UUCP> <3732@palo-alto.DEC.COM> Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department Lines: 88 In article <3732@palo-alto.DEC.COM>, vixie@palo-alto.DEC.COM (Paul Vixie) writes: < brisco@pilot.njin.net (Thomas Paul Brisco) writes: < # What I mean by "all my routing" is all my routing. I only < # have to say "rutgers!foo!user" and let the rutgers mail look < # up the path to site foo. So, it literally does *all my routing*. (I < # don't know how else to say it). < > This is only a demonstration of _passive routing_, which is a Good Thing > according to me and is quite different from what Rutgers actually does. > > If I send mail to rutgers!foobar!user, knowing full well that "foobar" is > not a neighbor of Rutgers but that Rutgers will find a route, this is all > very nice and very convenient and NOT what I am yelling about. > > What Rutgers actually does is _RErouting_. Not _passive routing_. > > Passive routing is where you always look for a way to send the mail to the > next hop in the path as you see it -- and it means finding a route IFF that > "next hop" is not a direct UUCP neighbor or an alias for a directly > reachable internet site. > > Rutgers, on the other hand, will find a route to just about anything it can > find in the path, starting from the RIGHT. From the END. Therefore if I > send a piece of mail to ...!rutgers!foo!bar!baz!user, knowing full well that > "foo" is a directly reachable neighbor of Rutgers, I have no guarantee at > all that Rutgers will actually send to "foo". It will look first for a way > to get to "baz", then to "bar", then to "foo", then finally give up if it > cannot find any of the above. THIS IS WRONG. > > It's an option in Smail, and I wish they'd never have included it. The only > possible justification is for replies along news paths, which are very long > and usually circuitous. However, if you have a mailer smart enough to look > something up in a routing database, you should be using the "From:" or the > "Reply-To:", not the "Path:". RN and readnews both have this option available. > > If you have neighbors who reply using the "Path:", then you gain yourself > nothing by rerouting the mail -- the message is coming through your system > no matter which direction is leaves. If you want to do your neighbors a > favor, tell them to make you their "smart-host" in their smail/pathalias > database and reconfigure their RN or readnews software to use "From:". This > way, the replies will come to your system more-or-less _asking_ you to find > a route for them. > > I'll say it again: rerouting an explicitly routed piece of mail is rude; the > practice always causes more confusion and anguish in the long run than any > of its doubtful benefits ever pay anyone back for. > -- > Paul Vixie > Digital Equipment Corporation Work: vixie@dec.com Play: paul@vixie.UUCP > Western Research Laboratory uunet!decwrl!vixie uunet!vixie!paul > Palo Alto, California, USA +1 415 853 6600 +1 415 864 7013 I use email a fair amount, both directly and in replying to news articles. Each network has its idiosyncracies, and they are incompatible. Also, I am not a systems person, and I feel I should not have to work so hard to send and receive mail. As it is, I have to edit the To: lines of most of the replies to news articles (all uucp addresses, due to a local mailing situation). Some of the time, I do not know if an address is uucp or inet; I must treat them differently. I have had quite a bit of mail bounce. Paul is absolutely right about "smart" mailers. Others posting responses to this article have complained, and rightly so, about taking a uucp ! path and affixing an inet @ site to it. Such a path cannot correctly get out of a uucp site. So what is the answer? An answer which has been proposed before is the use of parentheses, or some such equivalent. Only the site facing a ( is allowed to look into the parenthetical expression. Thus Paul could enclose the tail of his path, which he does want Rutgers to break into, in parentheses. An inet site could put the uucp ! path into parentheses, and I could use it directly for a return address without having to mung it. There was a situation in which my wife, mainly using a different machine, wished to make a direct reply. This was worked around. With parentheses, it would have been trivial. A hierarchical address scheme, with each level operating independently without any knowledge of the structure of the other levels, should be implementable and has the additional property that if someone comes up with xyznet with its peculiar addressing scheme, nothing has to be changed. One level need only get the message to the gateway to the next level; it does not have to read what goes on at the next level, and if it is supplied with the return to the previous host, so mail can be returned if necessary, it does not need to know what went before. Is there any attempt to implement something reasonable like this? -- Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907 Phone: (317)494-6054 hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet, UUCP)