sylvain@lvbull.UUCP (Sylvain Langlois RCG-ARS) (02/05/85)
<*****>
I tried to answer by mail to news articles, and sometimes it works fine, but
sometimes it fails also! Last time I tried, I wanted to send some mail to
Jacob about his WM's son. News article (reference <7526@brl!tgr>) was
giving following path: "mcvax!seismo!brl-tgr!tgr!jacob".
I received a mail from "mcvax!seismo!umcp-cs!nrl-css!MAILER-DAEMON" telling
me that "brl-tgr" was an "Unknown host". It also happened when I tried
to answer by mail to some articles posted by Lauren (you-know-who) and
another one posted at UC-San-Diego.
What's wrong? I noticed that paths given in news articles were not
"optimized", but that's how the net is done, and it depends on the route
followed by articles. Fine! But I was expecting that, even if it was
taking more time that it should to reach the originator, it should reach it
somehow. Apparently, it doesn't.
Is it a routing problem, or is it an "ARPA-bug" ?
Any idea?
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Sylvain "Carminarem" Langlois (...{seismo}!mcvax!vmucnam!lvbull!sylvain)ekrell@ucla-cs.UUCP (02/13/85)
I think that the path in the Path: line is a news path, not a uucp path.
Therefore, there is no guarantee that if you answer using the same path
it'll work since sometimes 2 sites have a news connection but not a mail
(uucp) one.
That's why people have signature lines where they write the prefered mail
address.
Of course, pathalias doesn't have this problem since you can feed it with
uucp connections only.
--
Eduardo Krell UCLA Computer Science Department
ekrell@ucla-locus.arpa ..!{sdcrdcf,ihnp4,trwspp,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!ekrell