From: fenner@postscript.cs.psu.edu (Bill Fenner)
Subject: Re: Mixed format addresses
Organization: Penn State Computer Science
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 1992 07:24:50 GMT

In article <eBmLVB4w165w@willard.UUCP> dawson@willard.UUCP writes:
|In particular, I was referring to sites that want Internet
|connectivity, and furthermore accept requests for UUCP connections from
|those who cannot afford to be directly on the Internet, yet refuse to accept
|that it is they (each and every sysadmin of each and every Internet site),
|who should make email to and from their UUCP friends WORK.

Ok, wait, let me get this straight.  You say that site foo.bar.edu accepts
a UUCP connection to your site, and therefore that makes me, at
cmf.nrl.navy.mil, responsible for being able to get mail to you?  Uh-uh.
If you want to look like part of the Internet, then get a domain name.  If
you don't want to play by the (easy and free) rules, then don't complain
that the game's no fun.

|> Well, the point is that if you don't ask someone if you can use someone else
|> as a gateway, you shouldn't be surprised if they get mad at you when they fin
|> out that you're the reason their phone bills just doubled.
|
|So, they should ask THEIR mail feed systems to do filtered mail delivery.

Huh?  The Internet isn't store-and-forward like UUCP; for the most
part, anyway.  If I want to send mail to foo.bar.edu, I'll open a
connection to foo.bar.edu (or mail.bar.edu, if they have an MX record)
and send it.  Who's going to do the filtering?

|There ought to be a universally available (easily accessible to both UUCP
|and Internet connected sites) means of determining which systems are willing
|to provide gateway services between the Internet and the "UUCP-net".

I'm not arguing that there shouldn't be.  I'm just saying that there
isn't now [that I know of].  It's not the data in the UUCP maps - 3 of
the 7 sites that I asked about their entries in d.Top responded.  Two
said that the entry was deprecated cruft (one of them said he barely
had any UUCP connections at all any more), and one said they would
route mail if I was a customer.

(This, btw, is the biggest problem with the UUCP maps.  Some of the
data is so ancient that there's no way it's current.  Not usually a
problem with the DNS; since the DNS is a distributed database, you can
be easily in charge of your little section, as opposed to having to
mail your database updates to central site X.)

|It has everything to do with the discussion.  Reasoning for MX over pathalias
|includes "it works so much better."  Does it really?  I don't think so.  Why?
|Because so many are using old, out-of-date mail delivery software.

The same people who are using old, out-of-date mail delivery software
are the same ones who are likely to use old, out-of-date pathalias
data.  At least, with the DNS, once you get it right, there's almost no
way to use out-of-date info.  With the UUCP maps, it's easy for
automated unpacking systems to break, sysadmin doesn't notice, *poof*,
you're using old data.

|You'll NEVER have the case where EVERYONE is registered in MX.

You mean the DNS.  Why not?  That was the original design goal.

|Even so, the MX system could soon be overwhelmed by the load of systems
|joining one domain or another.

The DNS is a distributed, scalable database.  The UUCP maps are significantly
more likely to get overwhelmed by numbers of systems than the DNS is.

|I don't see how this system
|of managing email routing is any better (by itself) than pathalias in its
|management of system resources or in its ability to properly route email.

Using the DNS, I have no need to store any information about anyone on
my computer; I can just look it up.  Using the UUCP maps, I have to keep
6.7 megs of map files, and a 1.6 meg (33k line) paths file.  Which seems
like the more desirable system?

|The maps and the MX records are truly authoritative.  Convincing Internet
|sites that routing to sites in the UUCP pseudo-domain is possible, despite
|"no" response from DNS queries, should be an interesting trick.

Well, all you need is a site that is willing to be a gateway for you, which
is where we seem to have started this conversation.

|Hence my earlier comments on an apparent lack of responsibility.
|Internet sysadmins have not yet been convinced that proper routing of
|email is a matter of responsible networking, or they would surely take it
|upon themselves to set up sites (which already do name service resolution)
|to also perform pathalias routing.

It makes no sense for an Internet-only site to run pathalias; the maps are
of no use for them.  Therefore, the site must find a way from the Internet
to UUCP.  The easiest way for it to do that is an MX record.

Why not register in the .US domain?  It's free, easy, and will let you get
E-Mail from the Internet with no trouble.  The .UUCP pseudo-domain is an
old hack that should have disappeared years ago.  That's the problem with
"transitionary" hacks, though - they never go away...

  Bill
Xref: sparky comp.mail.misc:3944 comp.mail.misc:3945