🚀 go-pugleaf

In article lear@NET.BIO.NET (Eliot Lear) writes:
> IN ALMOST EVERY CASE, given a path of a!b!c!d!e..., if I am `b', I can
> determine whether the `d' you mentioned is the `d' in the UUCP maps by
> checking to see if `c' claims that `d' is a neighbor.

I don't disbelieve you.  I remain neutral on the issue of whether it is
a good idea to reroute or not to.  I have never -administered- a mail
host, so everything I know about this stuff comes from you guys.  However,
I do remember one particular situation which merits comment.

One day, a long time ago, amd had a local workstation that happened to
name itself "island".  amd talks to "sco".  Someone at sco mailed me:
    amd!sun!island!argv

The mail admin at amd rerouted mail and, as you can imagine, all my mail
went to this guy's workstation and it bounced back.  One could use this
as an argument not to reroute, but I don't think so -- at the time, the
"management" at island were ignorant about "usenet" and so on and they
wanted "island" to be "unknown" to the world.  Island talks (or has talked)
via uucp to client machines that may or may not have been on the net.
The management felt that if island were "registered", then people would
figure out how to mail to a "sensitive" company and all hell would break
lose.  So, island remianed unregistered for a long time and our connection
to the world was advertised as sun!island...  The guy at amd could not be
held responsible for the decision island made about registering "island."

The point is, there are lots of companies who, whether they are aware of
it or not, are not registered with a domain or in the uucp maps or whatever.
This is more common than people seem to think.

Also, what does one do about all the machines within a company.
For example, at island, my workstation's name is "maui".  It's a sun and
runs your standard sendmail.cf.  People from the outside get my mail and
it reads ...sun!island!maui!argv.  Altho island is now a registered uucp
site, none of the workstations at island are.  And they won't be; machines
and machine names come and go like (fill in your own analogy) at island.
At one time, I had spent long hours trying to figure out how to configure
island's sendmail.cf to have it not mention the other machines at island
and to have outgoing mail always say island!<user>.  Replies from the
outside worked just fine, but then we upgraded to SunOS 3.5 and my hack
no longer worked, and I haven't looked into it since.  I doubt that most
of these companies who don't know squat about email are going to know much
more than I did.

What does one do about these situations?  To me, it seems like the best
thing to do is not reroute because chances are [%] that there are going
to be addresses which route thru or are destined for hostnames which are
not registered.  Of course, fully qualified domain names are quite a diff-
erent issue.

[%] I don't venture to guess on the likely hood of "chances" since I
don't have empirical evidence.


dan <island!argv@sun.com>
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My postings reflect my opinion only -- not the opinion of any company.