🚀 go-pugleaf

tronix@polari.uucp writes:
   My question is: Why on Earth is this header so loooong? I can't
   quite make out the process by which it got to Compuserve and then
   back to me. Any mail gurus care to answer?

   [Path from CompuServe showing something akin to
    osu-cis!gatech!uw-beaver!sumax!polari!tronix,
    somewhat freely aliased between UUCP OWHNs and Internet FQDNs]

That was the address Kathy used to reach you, probably just a blind
reply to your From: line, which seems to have worked, in all
likelihood, through the arguable magic of smail REROUTE behavior.  All
things considered, that wasn't a half bad path to reach you, although
one could question why gatech got involved.

   [Path to CompuServe showing something bearing a resemblance to
    sumax!uw-beaver!ames!mailrus!gatech!cwjcc!osu-cis!compuserve!postmaster]

That's because pathalias is a sucky way to route mail between Internet
sites.  The simplest "!-path" from your site to CompuServe looks like
	sumax.seattleu.edu!saqqara.cis.ohio-state.edu!compuserve!postmaster
because sumax.seattleu.edu (UUCP OWHN "sumax") is IP-accessible and I
can ping it from my basement SLIP connection in ~460ms, or ~185ms from
Ohio State proper.

But pathalias routing involves hand-crafted weighting which is often
not especially close to reality, and a !-path showing subpaths of
"mailrus!gatech!cwjcc!uccba" or something of that ilk reaching here is
pretty common, even though _all_ those hosts can speak directly to OSU
over the Internet.

Side note, I find it amusing that gatech shows up in 3 Received:
headers, as its mailer talked to itself, with the end result that it
optimized uccba right out of things, as well as noticing that the
original "cwjcc!hal" component really reduces to usenet.ins.cwru.edu.
(uccba originally appeared just before osu-cis.)  It's not GRR, and
it's not DARR, but it's Some Sort Of RR, that's for sure.  (And I'll
bet you thought that rabid rerouters were ever so rare.)

So anyway, your mail to CServe took a particularly contorted route
because the pathalias data (probably as invoked by what you called
your mailer's "autoroute" option) has routes which don't describe
reality, either in the fully-interconnected nature of the Internet, or
in the true weightings of which hosts speak to each other how often;
and the reply back to you took a not-quite-as-contorted route because
Kathy just replied to the supplied From:, with all the meanderings
implied therein.

--karl