🚀 go-pugleaf

Would

	MAIL FROM:<@Berkeley.EDU:unknownhost.Berkeley.EDU>

be an acceptable short term solution for mail sent from UC Berkeley?

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Now, in reply to:

	Date: Fri 11 Oct 85 19:19:13-PDT
	From: Mark Crispin <Crispin@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
	Cc: header-people@MIT-MC.ARPA
	Postal-Address: 725 Mariposa Ave. #103; Mountain View, CA 94041-1869
	Phone: +1 (415) 968-1052
	Message-Id: <12150399743.19.CRISPIN@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>

Rather than flaming about flaming, lets come up with some solutions.

A centrally maintained host table is soon going to become to big to manage
effectively.  (At Berkeley we expect to have over 3000 "hosts" in the next
couple of years.)  So the Internet world is moving towards distributed
nameservers.

General working policy is that the experimental side of the Internet
(the ARPANET backbone and friends) develops and debugs the system before
it is adopted by the operational side of the Internet (the Milnet backbone
and friends).  This is the assumption of RFC 921 which planned for
completion of the Domain Naming System by 15 July 1985 and decommissioning
of the host tables for the DARPA research community (non-DDN) on 15 September
1985.

Up to 15 Sep 85 we could have software that assumed the Internet mail system
was one mail system. That is no longer true.

	     Read the appropriate documents regarding the status of domains
	on the Milnet.

I would not assume that the DARPA research community gets all the documents
about the DDN. (Which documents by the way? DDN newsletter?)

	Domains have *not* been officially adopted as a naming registry
	that the entire Internet must use.

I am not sure what you are trying to say here. Domain "host" names are being
put in both the host table and nameservers for use by the entire Internet.
So I must assume you are saying that domain nameservers are not currently
operational on the DDN and implementation may, or may not be scheduled
for the DDN.

	You can NOT go sending out headers with non-registered names
	to Milnet.

Here is where we have a problem.  First, lets change Milnet to all DDN
operational nets and ask how a non-DDN site determines if a host is
a DDN host.  What about hosts that are on both a DDN net and on
a DARPA research community net, how do you determine which type of
address to send. The world is not simple anymore. Add another
complication, with the implementation of domain name servers
the Internet mail system now extends beyond the physical Internet.

Second, according to RFC 921 on 15 Sep 85 "the master host table
maintained by the NIC need no longer be complete for the DARPA research
community. A full table of the DDN hosts will be maintained by the
NIC."  To me, that means that DARPA research community sites only need
to register names of mail domains and their nameservers. Now if NIC
deletes all non-DDN hosts from the host table used by a DDN host,
how is that host going to know if the return mail domain is registered
or not?  Somewhere along the line, I think the Internet mail developers
forgot to deal with this issue.

	... while some part of the network is stuck with the host
	table as a registration authority the maintainers of software
	on that network have to continue to support that environment.

True, within that part of the network, but not necessarily for the
rest of the Internet.  What if we follow the original plan and
have two logical Internet mail systems, one using host tables
and one using nameservers?  Is the source routing kludge

	<@known-nameserver-domain-host:localmailbox@unknowndomain>

sufficent, or do we implement Mail Transport Agents on "mail-bridge
gateway" hosts that know about both sides of the Internet mail
world?

Bill Wells
postmaster%ucbjade@Berkeley.EDU
BITINFO@UCBJADE.BITNET
<@Berkeley.EDU:postmaster@ucbjade.Berkeley.EDU>  ??