🚀 go-pugleaf

karl@dinosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes:

>clewis@eci386.uucp writes:
>>  It also appears obvious that anyone giving an explicit bang path
>>  (eg: a!b!c!d) may very well know what they're doing, and it shouldn't be
>>  touched.

>Not so.  A random sampling of 263 !-paths which passed through my
>system earlier this month (I picked a few wholly arbitrary "grep"
>criteria on /usr/spool/uucp/mail.log) revealed that the average !-path
>length is more than twice as long as the average length of a path in
>/usr/lib/uucp/paths.  The users do not know what they are doing.
>They're guessing, and badly so.

I think we're being a bit too hard on those users here.  There are
several contributing factors that (probably) make this an inappropriate
conclusion.

The first obvious culpret is replying to news.  Rn (Rnmail?) has generated
some really horrendous paths for me to mail 'next door'.  Like 20 or so
hops.  Since a lot of folks have MTAs that don't understand '@' addresses,
we're likely to see this sort of pathing until they all fix their
mailers.  Real Soon Now. :-(.

The second is the way a number of the MUAs work.  Elm, mush, mailx, etc,
can all wind up being configured such that they generate the return
path by reversal.  While this might be considered Evile (sic) and Rude,
if your MTA don't understand '@', it's the only choice.  So you wind
up generating these bizarre and convoluted paths *and the user never
sees them*.  They're depending on the MTA to figure out what is needed
to reply, *and they should*.
-- 
Steve Simmons		          scs@vax3.iti.org
Industrial Technology Institute     Ann Arbor, MI.
"Velveeta -- the Spam of Cheeses!" -- Uncle Bonsai