From: daniel@danbo.bg (Daniel Kalchev)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.bulgaria
Subject: Re: Re : FAQ soc.culture.bulgaria V0.1
Date: 16 Nov 92 04:41:04 GMT
Organization: Digital Systems

> There are quite a few machines then that belong to that "EXCEPT" category ,
> i.e. which don't know how to send mail to the .bg domain (unless the full
> path is specified). Further comments below...

The only cure for those sites is to include the bg domain in their hard
coded tables. Those sites usualy use sendmail. If your mail bounces, try to
talk to teh sysadmin of the site that bounced it. Do this before you
complain about unreliable mail flow. Tell them that no matter if they dont
know where Bulgaria is, such country does exist, and they may like it at
the summer. <smile>

> >: The FAQ should explain that in such cases the
> >: full path to the remote UUCP host has to be specified, as in the following
> >: example: if your mail to user@host.bg bounces, use any of the following addres-
> >: ses instead -- relay.eu.net!bg!host!user
> >:           or   relay.eu.net!uucp!host!user
> >These two forms are incorrect. No mail addressed this way should reach
> >Bulgaria.
>
> No, they are correct. I would not mislead people by giving them untested
> routes. Besides, it is obvious to anybody who has experience with UUCP style
> "!" notation that the above addresses are correct.
> To prove this to yourself, just send mail to yourself using a path like this
> one: cs.utexas.edu!csuvax1.murdoch.edu.au!csi.forth.gr!bg!danbo!daniel  .
> The message will go around the globe and back to you as "promised" (unless
> your mailer parses the address first and uses shorter paths when such are
> discovered).

Which is exactly what any EUnet backbone mailer will do.  Local mail needs
not travel the globe.  As well as most uucp compatible mailers.  What is
incorrect in your examples are the sitenames "bg" and "uucp".  Such sites
do NOT exist.  That is, your mail came to me only because "danbo" was known
somewhere along the path, not because it would have worked.  Actually, all
UUCP feeds to BG are "smart", so a path of "garbage!danbo!daniel" will work
too.

> Actually, I did not reveal any mystery by supplying the information that I
> have -- this problem arises because often users equate unwittingly '.fr',
> '.at', '.it', '.gr'... domain addresses with '.bg' ones, unaware of the fact
> that the former have Internet connections while the latter are connected by
> means of UUCP. When you realize this, all you have to do is read the FAQ
> on UUCP style addressing and the concomitant concepts of full path, etc...
> So, an earlier statement stands, namely that "...sometimes...the list of
> local Internet forwarders does not contain references to the 'bg' domain",
> the fact that others do so notwithstanding.

Which is of course not true. :) Do a:

dig @ns.forth.gr bg. axfr

as ns.forth.gr is the primary namesever for .bg, and you will see for
yourself which .bg domains have MX (Internet) forwarders, and who they are.
The practical difference between the site acmbul.bg and somesite.de is that
the first does not have an A name server record.  Anything that is
"Internet compatible" should be using the MX records to decide where to
deliver mail.  Those records of course point to perfectly valid Internet
hosts with (several) A records.  Nothing magical.  Simply the way things
work.  The only restriction is that you cant telnet to acmbul.bg of course.

You should not assume that Bulgaria is connected with UUCP to the world.
This may, or may not be the case, and has nothing to do with domain
addressing.

> >b) if this doesnt work, send mail to the UUCP address as listed, like
> >user@acmbul.uucp;
>
> More likely than not, "b)" won't work. To verify this, just send mail to
> root@name.uucp where 1) name.uucp is located in the same city where you live
>              and     2) 'name' does not belong to the list of uucp sites that
> are connected to yours(i.e. does not belong to the list produced by uuname).

Hmm.... I think you are way off here. I am running a national backbone, and
few of our sites are not connected to the backbone directly, but via
another site. I nevertheless use site.uucp to reach such sites, and do so
without problems. It makes no difference where the site is located.
FYI, the .uucp "domain" is a kludge to "trick" the purely Internet mailers
to deliver to a gateway, or lookup another table (in sendmail), .bitnet
is the same sort of kludge.

> For large cities in N. America "1) and 2)" instances always exist .
> Chances are that name.uucp will be reported unresolvable even though it is
> located in the same city( depending on the software used).

I like the part in parenthesis. Actually, if you a) are an purely IP site
and send any "kludged" address to a gateway, or b) you compile your uucp
routing database as you should, with something like pathalias; you should
not have problems.

Fortunately, we are in Bulgaria. <smile>

I think we should move this discussion out of the group, if you are
interested.

Daniel
Xref: sparky soc.culture.bulgaria:1717 soc.culture.greek:10845