mark (09/28/82)
There is a (new) ARPANET convention that says that mail to "Postmaster"
will be passed to an appropriate person. (Sort of like "root" is for
UNIX, but more likely to really work, and aimed at a mail administrator
instead of a general system administrator.) One alternative is to
implement this convention.
While it's probably good for mail to "general" to be posted to general,
it's probably not a good idea to send mail to foo!general when looking
for a particular person. Perhaps that site would rather a person
deal with such things than having it posted.
It might make sense to have "Postmaster" and "General Delivery" be
two separate concepts. Discussion on this is invited.
Are there any systems out there that would have trouble implementing
the "Postmaster" alias? Because it's longer than 8 characters, or
because of the upper case "P"? (Hopefully "postmaster", "POSTMASTER",
"PostMaster", and "postmast" would all work as well.) For bureaucratic
reasons (and if so, is there another convention that would be easier
for you?)
Discussion on the mailing address syntax (the heirarchical notion
vs. straight user@host.uucp) is also invited. This newsgroup is
for issues of UUCP mail, and to a lesser extent, UNIX mail. It
is not for ARPANET mail issues (since there are two ARPANET mailing
lists, header-people@mit-mc and msggroup@mit-mc [I'm unsure of the
latter host] for that purpose). No, a gateway is not appropriate,
since the subject matter is different, and there has been a high
level of flaming lately that UUCP people are unlikely to be
interested in. ("MIT is violating the ARPANET standard by generating
addresses of the form user@host@host", "Well, that's only because
you guys changed the standard on us and didn't tell anybody", etc.)
Mark