🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <701@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> kagle@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu.UUCP (Jonathan C. Kagle) writes:
>
>	For the past month or so, I have been trying to get in touch with a
>friend at The University of St. Andrews, in Scotland.  Unfortunately, the
>mail is swallowed somewhere along the way there.  I can send mail to:
>username%uk.ac.st-and.sava@ac.uk with no positive (reply) or negative (error
>message) feedback from St. Andrews.  I have tried to get through to the post-
>master/mistress, but I have recieved no reply.
>	I have already sent mail to bogus addresses, with varying success.  I
>sent a letter to postmaster%uk.ac.st-and.xxx@ac.uk, and other permutations, and
>I get a "No Such Address"-type error message from the BITNET-JANET gateway.
>However if I send a message to xxx%uk.ac.st-and.sava@ac.uk, I get no response
>at all (BTW, I did try several replacements for the xxx's, so there could be
>no chance that I reached real usernames at St. Andrews.).

There are three main gateways into the UK. UKC have the uucp gateway, UCL
the arpa/csnet/x400 gateways and RAL have a gateway into BITNET/EARN. For
reasons of funding, neither UKC or UCL will forward mail for unauthorised
users. In the UK we have to pay the network bills for transatlantic traffic,
so if someone can't or won't pay their share of these costs, UCL and UKC have
not much option but to silently junk the mail. [This is not as bad as it seems;
all the UK UUCP sites are registered with UKC and pay up. There would be no
problem there, except the site you want to get to is not a UUCP site - it's
a VMS VAX. It's likely that if your mail ends up at UCL or UKC it goes to
/dev/null and you'll hear nothing about that fact.]

Now the BITNET/EARN gateway is currently free - I think IBM have sponsored a
line till 1988. There shouldn't be any problem of authorisation there, at
least for now.

The address you give is a little curious. You are asking for the mail to
be sent to "ac.uk" from your local machine. Where will your mail system
send this (if anywhere)? If it goes to the RAL gateway - called UKACRL
on BITNET/EARN - it should get through OK.

The UK address you give is more or less correct, but could throw the gateway.
Firstly the address is in UK domain order. The RAL gateway (or some mailer
inbetween you and it) could swap the order round to RFC822 form. This could
upset the gateway if it expects addresses to be in one of either RFC822 or
UK order and gets presented with the other order. Secondly, the UK academic
network has two names for each site (and you thought swapping the domain
ordering was bad...)! These names are known as long and short form names, the
long form names being the standard "approved" ones. The gateway at RAL could
be fussy enough to only accept the standard form name. The address you gave
- uk.ac.st-and.sava - is the short form name. The standard form name is
uk.ac.st-andrews.sava.

The gateways at UKC and UCL are clever enough to swap domain ordering around
and map between long and short names. In short, they hide the lunacy of the
UK naming scheme from the rest of the world. I don't know how well the RAL
gateway copes with this, if at all. Ask the postmaster there.

My advice to you is first determine which gateway you used (or want to use)
and ask the postmaster there how mail addresses for the UK can be presented
to his/her mail system. From what you said, it sounds like your mail didn't
always make it to a gateway, so I'd suggest you trace what happens on the
path to the gateway and back to you.

I don't think a UK gateway is at fault - they are quite good at returning
error/status messages, so I would suspect your path to the gateway is not
reliable.

If the gateway is forwarding the mail OK, the problem must then be at St.
Andrews. Perhaps your friend there isn't able to send mail back to you. It
is also possible that there is no postmaster there - about 20-30% of sites
in JANET don't even have a postmaster! (JANET is the UK Academic network.)

>	Could someone help me get through?  Have I found a mailer bug?  Should
>I use another gateway?  HELP!

Well, I think I've given enough explanation above. It's not a mailer bug,
though someone's mailer could well be misconfigured. Please mail me (if
you can) for more information. I'd be glad to help. I felt that a net-wide
posting could be of general benefit to others in the same position as you.

		Jim

PS: Can you imagine the fun we had when someone in the UK wanted to register
uk.ac.xxxx.com?
PPS: 256 -rw-------  1 root       256112 Jan 26 16:10 /usr/lib/sendmail.fc
Is this a record?

ARPA:	jim%cs.strath.ac.uk@ucl-cs.arpa, jim@cs.strath.ac.uk
UUCP:	jim@strath-cs.uucp, ...!seismo!mcvax!ukc!strath-cs!jim
JANET:	jim@uk.ac.strath.cs

"JANET domain ordering is swapped around so's there'd be some use for rev(1)!"