🚀 go-pugleaf

>   From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
>   Date: 17 Jul 89 19:12:36 GMT
>
>   Did anyone think that people typed those 20-hop paths by hand?  Especially
>   people who don't know what they are doing?  Replies to news articles
>   and subsequent replies to those messages are almost certainly the source
>   of everything the rabid rerouters complain about.

Yes, this is probably true.  But the problem is that the Path: header
was never designed to be the return address; the Reply-To: header
should be used, and if that header isn't present, the From: header
should be used.  When building and installing news, INTERNET should
always be defined.  Even on dumb systems, the "mailpaths" file may be
used to cause replies to articles to be routed to a smart host for routing.

>   So, why not fix it in the news software by making hosts that are capable
>   of re-routing rewrite the Path: line so that mail following the Path:
>   will be "dynamically" re-routed?  That way the dumber downstream sites
>   don't need to change anything (any they probably won't anyway).

SUFFER, "dumber downstream sites"!! :-)  Or clean up your act.

In article <AMBAR.89Jul30161342@binkley.mit.edu> ambar@bloom-beacon.mit.edu (Jean Marie Diaz) writes:
>Because one of the purposes of the Path: header in news (in my opinion,
>the PRIMARY purpose) is to track the places where that article has
>already gone, and not send it on further.  Your suggestion would have
>news travelling in loops, further overloading high-bandwidth sites.

This isn't "one of the purposes"; it's THE purpose.  Actually, without
it, articles would not travel in loops, because articles have
message-IDs (and duplicates would be rejected).  But dropping the
Path: mechanism would greatly increase the number of duplicate
articles arriving at what we used to call backbone sites.  This
wouldn't cause The Death Of Usenet As We Know It (TDOUAWKI) but it
would greatly increase some folks' phone bills.

>Using the Path: header as a mail reply path is, at best, unreliable, and
>at worst (think of moderated newsgroups, or newsgroups that are
>gatewayed to and from mailing lists) completely wrong.

Right on.  Add: totally unnecessary; any site can install a free
routing mailer, or pass news replies to a neighbor who has one.
Anyone who sends mail on a 20-hop path deserves to wait a long time
for it to be delivered.



-- 
-- Joe Buck	jbuck@epimass.epi.com, uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck