Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!vixie From: vixie@decwrl.dec.com (Paul A Vixie) Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc Subject: Re: Another example why not to re-route Message-ID:Date: 30 Nov 88 06:30:51 GMT References: <352@lakart.UUCP> Sender: vixie@decwrl.dec.com Organization: DEC Western Research Lab Lines: 44 In-reply-to: dg@lakart.UUCP's message of 28 Nov 88 21:36:54 GMT [Goodenough] # Take as an example the path Mr. Vixie's posting took to reach # lakart from decwrl: # # lakart!cfisun!ima!spdcc!bloom-beacon!husc6!purdue!decwrl!vixie # # as opposed to the "optimal" path from lakart to decwrl: # # lakart!xait!garp!decvax!decwrl!vixie # # Now, if I'm footing the bill for transferring this information, which path # do you think I'm going to use. From the point of view of people who spend # quite a bit of money moving other people's mail around, they want to shorten # up paths as much as possible to save their (& other sites) costs. In various past articles I have answered this. Basically, you should NOT be using a netnews Path: line to send mail. At one point I went so far as to recommend that the character chosen to separate the hostnames in the "Path:" line be changed to something other than a "!" since it looked so much like a UUCP path that it was confusing a lot of people. It is NOT a UUCP path and if you send mail along a "Path:" and it works, you are lucky. In times past there have been many "news only" links. I think I might make my home machine into a netnews hub for my area and not run mail on it, just to get lots and lots of articles into the bitstream that cannot be replied to via the "Path:" line. This is in the spirit of "making things worse so they'll get better," though, and it's a sad victory if it works at all. There is NO REASON to use a "Path:" line to mail a reply to an author. If you want to run a full pathalias-based auto-router, you can get smail and uuhosts and pathalias from a comp.sources.unix archive -- they're all free. If you want to run a smail with no local database, you don't need pathalias or uuhosts, you just use a "smart-host" in your paths file. All your out- bound traffic that you don't know the full route for will go to some smart neighbor or near-neighbor. Quoting myself: # There is no problem solved by re-routing that cannot be solved otherwise; # there are problems CAUSED by re-routing that cannot be solved at all. -- 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