jack@vu44.UUCP (Jack Jansen) (09/07/84)
Since the average path on an article or mail has become
completely unintellegible, wouldn't it be a good idea to reform
all paths to the standard on the network they are on?
For instance, if SITE1 recieves an article from SITE2 on the
arpanet (with the path user@SITE2.ARPA), it would convert it
to site1!site2.arpa!user before sending it on to uucp sites.
This has the advantage that it is intellegible to normal
uucp users, and besides that, that an article that came from
uucp, then went thru arpanet, and then came back into uucp
again would have a valid path. At the moment, if the article
used path poster_site->arpa_site->arpa_site_2->uucp_site,
the path will look like uucp_site!arpa_site_2!poster_site!user@arpa_site
which is unusable. If all arpa to uucp gateways would convert the
adresses, it would look something like
usenet_site!arpa_site_2!arpa_site.arpa!poster_site.uucp!user
which could probably be parsed by everyone.
Awaiting mail telling me how stupid I am,
Jack Jansen, {philabs|decvax}!mcvax!vu44!jackmark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (09/12/84)
In general, the Path line is to keep track of where an article has already been, not to provide a working mail reply path. Part of the reason is that the Path mechanism just can't deal with the various syntaxes of various nets. That's what From is for. I recognize that many machines still use the Path for replies, but that's only because their mailer doesn't understand internet domain addresses, that problem should go away within a year. Jack Jansen makes a good suggestion for a specific improvement, however, and once we have a significant number of sites that understand host.arpa!user that seems like a good change to make.