Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!purdue!decwrl!vixie From: vixie@decwrl.dec.com (Paul Vixie) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: When to reroute (Re: active rerouting) Message-ID: <802@bacchus.dec.com> Date: 14 Sep 88 00:10:39 GMT References: <4740@b-tech.UUCP> <4747@b-tech.UUCP> <4748@b-tech.UUCP> <4753@b-tech.UUCP> <1426@ficc.uu.net> <6548@chinet.UUCP> Sender: vixie@decwrl.dec.com Organization: DEC Western Research Lab Lines: 49 # I would rather see a standard way to explicitly request a site to re-route # and everything else should be left alone if deliverable. You've got the seeds of your answer: if the supposed next-hop-to-send-to is not something you speak to "directly", feel free to reroute. But if it's a neighbor which you've published in the UUCP Map (which is likely, if someone knows to try to use your connection to it), you should fulfill your implicit promise to deliver the darned message to the neighbor. Summary: don't reroute unless the alternative is bouncing it. # Then news software running on machines that do not have the map data could # pass replies off to the nearest site that knows how to route it. The above solution will work fine with the "mailpaths" mechanism in B News, or with the "smart-host" mechanism in Smail. In either case, you just forward the message to your nearest smart router, writing up the path as though the place you want to get to was a neighbor of the place you are forwarding it to: foo!bar!smarthost!%s ...will expand "user@mumble.uucp" or "mumble!user" into foo!bar!smarthost!mumble!user ...and the fact that "mumble" is not a directly reachable neighbor will clue "smarthost" in on the need to find a route. This works. It works today. If we could get the rabid rerouters off their high horse and convince them somehow to be more polite (and to honor the implicit promise many people see in their UUCP map entry), we would all be able to spend more time advancing the state of the art instead of wondering why our last message to some distant friend was never answered. I can mark active rerouters dead in my own pathalias build, but sites that don't do that might end up either not being able to reach me (because a rabid rerouter decided to send the mail to Italy) or, worse, All The Mail In The Universe will suddenly start flowing through my machine because someone mistakenly published a shortcut through my machine and some distant large site insists that anything coming through their machine bound for some large fraction of the internet _must_ go through my machine because it's suddenly the "most efficient way". Pfaa. Don't mind me, I'm just bellyaching. -- Paul Vixie Work: vixie@decwrl.dec.com decwrl!vixie +1 415 853 6600 Play: paul@vixie.sf.ca.us vixie!paul +1 415 864 7013