gds@mit-eddie.UUCP (Greg Skinner) (07/15/84)
The person wanted mail sent to him to go as:
vaxB!himself%vaxA@csnet-relay
Perhaps to clarify things up, the original poster of this message might
provide the actual names of vaxA and vaxB, then he might not have to use
sendmail.cf obscurities to get his messages. From the original message,
he said that the sender was actually on a CSNET machine, so couldn't he
just do:
vaxB!himself@vaxA
since vaxA and XYZ (the sender's machine) are on the same net? (If it's
required to route all intra-CSNET mail explicitly through csnet-relay,
forgive me, but I have forgotten the specs for sending mail around
CSNET, and it seems like lossage to me to have to explicitly supply a
central relay node for all mail within one network.) As far as I
remember, csnet-relay is used to route all intra-CSNET mail to
respective CSNET hosts, and it also serves as a mail gateway to the
ARPAnet, but I don't remember users having to supply csnet-relay in
their To: lines (I do remember Via: csnet-relay in a few headers that
came out of CSNET onto the ARPA Internet).
Of course, this does become an interesting problem if the sender is on
another net (like the ARPA Internet). I have a similar problem, in that
mit-eddie is a ! over @ class host (which puzzles me, since mit-eddie is
on a network which uses @'s and is directly addressable to the ARPAnet
and some hosts on Internet network 18), therefore I can't send mail to an
address like uucp-host!user@Berkeley and expect mit-eddie to send the
mail out to berkeley then to uucp-host, rather the mail will be rejected
if mit-eddie does not talk to uucp-host.
My personal beef with sendmail.cf is that you have to hardwire your
precedence into your mailer. Like in a programming language, the sender
of mail should be able to specify a precedence for the route he wants
his mail to take, assuming that the route he selects is legal.
I guess whenever domains are implemented a lot of these problems will go
away. Sadly enough, they are still with us.
Well, I guess I'll let some SMTP and sendmail gurus chew over this for a
while. Really though, do CSNET people have to include csnet-relay in
their To: lines to send mail intranet?
--
Those who know me have no need for my name.
Greg Skinner (gregbo)
{decvax!genrad, eagle!mit-vax, allegra!banyan, whuxle, ihnp4}!mit-eddie!gds