🚀 go-pugleaf

vjs@rhyolite.wpd.sgi.com (Vernon Schryver) writes:

> A UUCP gateway necessarily must translate from whatever is happening on
> the Internet to whatever is right in the connected UUCP world.
> That necessarily means rewriting all addresses appropriately.  In some
> UUCP worlds, only !-paths work.

I think the only world where this is still true is AT&T.  Everywhere else,
probably 99% of the UUCP sites, now understand domain addresses.  And many
of the sites that do require !-paths, (people running unmodified AT&T
SysV.2, old Xenixes, etc.) don't honor Reply-To: for return addresses
anyway, they use the From_ line.

Even for those few sites that only understand ! paths, you're not doing
them a favor by rewriting domain addresses into !s unless you're a direct
neighbor, because after one or two more hops, the original !-path has often
been mutilated into something that is not only wrong, but can't even be
hand-translated back into a working !-path.  At least an untouched
@-address can be rewritten by hand into a !-path on non-domainist sites.

> Years
> ago, I found it necessary to to assume the other end does not do FQDN's
> unless told otherwise.  More recently, it has been effective to assume
> FQDN's are understood unless bounces are seen.

Very much so - and even if bounces are seen, it's worth checking with the
owner of the affected site and letting him/her know about it first.  It's
often easier to get someone to install smail 2.5 or something, than deal
with the continual problems caused by rewriting domain addresses into
!-paths.

-- 
Tom Fitzgerald   Wang Labs       fitz@wang.com   "I went to the universe today;
1-508-967-5278   Lowell MA, USA                   It was closed...."