Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!ece-csc!ncsuvx!gatech!cwjcc!hal!ncoast!allbery From: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: active rerouting Message-ID: <12604@ncoast.UUCP> Date: 23 Sep 88 21:56:46 GMT References: <4740@b-tech.UUCP> <4747@b-tech.UUCP> <4748@b-tech.UUCP> <6581@chinet.UUCP> <2105@edsews.EDS.COM> Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon S. Allbery) Followup-To: comp.mail.uucp Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh Lines: 40 As quoted from <2105@edsews.EDS.COM> by roberts@edsews.EDS.COM (Ted Roberts): +--------------- | In article <6581@chinet.UUCP>, les@chinet.UUCP (Leslie Mikesell) writes: | > | > Suppose | > you want siteC to route siteA!siteB!siteC!domain.dom!user or | > siteA!siteB!siteC!user@domain.dom. | | These are not the same thing. The first route would send to siteA, then | siteB, then siteC and siteC would route to user@domain.dom which they | would know how to do since they know how to resolve domain addresses | (you hope:-). The second would attempt to send to domain.dom, then to | siteA, then to siteB, then to site C, then to user. This is because the | "@" syntax takes precedence over the "!" syntax. +--------------- WRONG!!! "@" and "!" are used by different networks -- there is NO defined precedence between them! (You're comparing apples to oranges.) UUCP sites give "!" precedence, Internet domain mailers give "@" precedence. On ncoast (a UUCP system) "!" has precedence. Our neighbor "hal" gives "@" precedence because they are on the Internet. This can be quite useful; if I want to send mail across the Internet I can mail to hal!foo@bar.COM, thus overriding the UUCP route (which may well be slower) that smail would give me from a straight "foo@bar.COM". On your system, you would probably want to switch to UUCP only after you got as "close" to the recipient's system as possible, so you would want "@" to have higher precedence. Thus, the current system is useful for both of us. Just don't assume that everyone's mailer handles things the same way, as we *are* on different networks. Things get even more interesting when you try to apply your rules to a DecNet network or to the Bitnet as well (on Decnet, does "::" have precedence above or below "@"? How about "!"? Does Decnet even *care* what the relative precedence of "!" and "@" is?) ++Brandon -- Brandon S. Allbery, uunet!marque!ncoast!allbery DELPHI: ALLBERY For comp.sources.misc send mail to ncoast!sources-misc "Don't discount flying pigs before you have good air defense." -- jvh@clinet.FI