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Article #369

Re: Going overboard on mail headers discussion

#369
From: gnu
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 1984 09:53
31 lines
2350 bytes
Ahem.  A moment of reality, please.  All this software was written
under time pressure and is still evolving.  Precious little of it
was originally written or designed to do what it is currently doing.
Five years ago, few of these systems had even rudimentary capability to
hook up to foreign networks -- many did not know how to pass data with
another machine of their own kind!

Being in the "leading edge" of mail technology, being in the biggest
most advanced and interconnected networks in the world has its prices:
things in thousands of hosts scatterred all over the world do not always,
necessarily, perfectly, work right every time.  I don't have time
to pop into sendmail every time someone reports a bug; my sendmail
bug folder has several hundred messages in it.  But I regularly send
and receive mail with people in Europe and on corporate networks, which
I could not do two years ago.

If you have a problem with somebody's headers, please, tell us about it.
But one tortured scream, and maybe a rebuttal, should suffice.
We can hopefully expound our theories of "the way to run the mail network"
without getting our throats this hoarse.

Personally I have written many programs that would coredump when given
invalid input data, but I didn't write them as production programs, I
wrote them as hacks.  In time of need, hacks are pressed into service
and fixed later.  This is not a cause for alarm; the alternative to
Unreliable mail service is No mail service, which is the default when
you first apply power to your chips and can continue in force for quite
a long time if desired.

As soon as we find a reliable mail service we'll be sure to tell you,
so we can talk to you with it.
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Message-ID: <1657@sun.uucp>
Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!mgnetp!ihnp4!drutx!houxe!hogpc!houti!ariel!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!hplabs!hpda!fortune!amd!decwrl!sun!gnu
References: <804@hou3c.UUCP>

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!mgnetp!ihnp4!drutx!houxe!hogpc!houti!ariel!vax135!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!hplabs!hpda!fortune!amd!decwrl!sun!gnu
From: gnu@sun.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.mail.headers
Subject: Re: Going overboard on mail headers discussion
Message-ID: <1657@sun.uucp>
Date: Thu, 30-Aug-84 05:53:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.1657
Posted: Thu Aug 30 05:53:43 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Sep-84 13:12:26 EDT
References: <804@hou3c.UUCP>
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Lines: 32