From: rick@ricksys.lonestar.org (Richard McCombs)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Mixed format addresses *[long]*
Summary: How do you know if you are lossing mail
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 92 03:10:43 CST
Followup-To: comp.mail.uucp
Organization: The Red Headed League; Lawton, Ok
X-Newsreader: rusnews v0.97


[What does this have to with waffle? note Followup]
[And since it's getting long I decided not to include c.b.w in the
Newsgroups]
les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell) writes:

> In article <8DL9VB2w165w@willard.UUCP> dawson@willard.UUCP (Willard Dawson) w
> rites:
> 
>>Just how do we go about monitoring the overall status of mail?  I'd say
>>that there is no way to measure the general health of the net in this
>>regard.
> 
> Obviously you can't check the health of every site that might want to
> send mail to you but if you have both a uucp name and a domain name
> you can check your forwarding from the internet by sending yourself
> messages in the form: path!to!forwarder!domain.name!you and
> path!to!forwarder!uucp_name!you.  Or, send a message to an address
> that doesn't exist and wait for the bounce to come back.  These don't
> actually test the DNS lookup, so you might also want to send through
> an different internet host to see if it can find your forwarder, but
> once that's working it is not likely to fail later.
> 

How is that going to test the uucp path to you?
[I may live to regret this but here goes.]
For instance, I am in the maps as ricksys with
ricksys=ricksys.lonestar.org in the map.
Even with a domain name I used to occasionally get mail from more than a
few hops away, often from someone within a few hops of uunet that had
used pathalias to find me which would cause it to travel to me via some
path other than via my MX, but it would still get to me soon enough.
Sometime in November I realized I hadn't received any mail from very far
away other than via my MX in a while and I was also curious what the
current path was to me from uunet, so I sent a test message from my
account on cleveland.freenet.edu to rick%ricksys.uucp@uunet.uu.net and
it bounced at (should I name names?) das.harvard.edu because it trys to
send to rwsys!ricksys!rick@pandora but can't do it.

I thought maybe that das.harvard.edu had a connection to pandora (I had
seen pandora in the Texas maps but had not looked at the Mass maps yet)
but didn't anymore.  So I grabbed the Mass maps and found this...

harv-net  = { babbage, pandora, sancho, charmm, harvard,
        chimera, endor, hucsc, hustat, tardis, harveps,
        husc4, husc7, husc8, husc9,
        talcott, wjh12, pitirim, huelings, harvisr, hucmt1, huma1}!(LOCAL)

The map said it was last update August 1, 1987.
[Isn't there something in the comp.mail.maps README about not listing
all of you hosts but only you domain gating system?  Why do they need to
be addressable as pandora.uucp?]

Then in July this became part or the Texas maps.

#N      pandora, pandora.lonestar.org
[...]
#W      pandora!cbradley (Chris Bradley); Sun Jul 26 23:10:21 CDT 1992
#
pandora = pandora.lonestar.org
#
pandora <deltos>(DIRECT+FAST), <letni>(DEMAND),
        jdavis(POLLED), kypris(DIRECT+FAST),
        mgx(DIRECT+FAST),<mic>(DIRECT+FAST), rwsys(DEMAND)

So Harvard has been using the name longer even though the probably don't
need it.  I sent a copy of the bounce along with the relevent portion of
the maps to both the postmaster@das.harvard.edu and
postmaster@pandora.lonestar.org and did not get a response. I probably
should have included the Texas uucpmap coordinator but I didn't.

Am I lossing mail?  How can I tell?  I can only hope that if someone
trys to send me mail and gets a bounce that they will send it to my
cleveland.freenet.edu account which gets forwarded to me.

If someone is close to pandora.lonestar.org and is not in a domain then
they would be likely to lose a lot of mail.

Lucky for me the local university here is getting on the Internet soon
so my connections will change soon.

BTW do map coordinators only grep the #N line when checking to see if a
system name is already being used?

-- 
Internet: rick@ricksys.lonestar.org,      bo836@cleveland.freenet.edu
UUCP: ...!rwsys!ricksys!rick,   {backbones}!ricksys.lonestar.org!rick
BITNET: bo836%cleveland.freenet.edu@cunyvm  Fidonet: Richard McCombs @ 1:385/6
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp