@RAND-UNIX.ARPA (02/15/84)
No manifesto intended! I'm just desperate for a reasonable solution that will be acceptable to everyone involved. The little machines are going to (apparently) be used heavily by corporate and other large entities who will be communicating with sites scattered across the world, and will (for speed and money reasons) want to route mail via the overall "best" route, taking full advantage of the high interconnectivity of the Internet. Would you really expect someone to send their mail to a "smart" name server, perhaps knowing that the server is topologically far away from the desired destination, if the sender knows of a more or less direct route that it can use easily? I just don't think that the concentration required by the forced use of name servers is practical or desirable. You might argue that uucp sites can do what they want and should leave everyone else alone. I would claim that is impossible. There are gateways springing up everywhere, and any attempt to "control" their use would just result in more "unofficial" hacks appearing to replace them. There's going to be one hell of a lot of traffic between the uucp net and everything else! One thing about the return path -- it is useful for addressing information only as a last resort in many cases. Especially for mail routed through centralized machines, the return path may well indicate a route that is far more costly (in terms of time and money) than many other (topologically shorter) routes. This really is a desperate situation. We probably have no more than a couple of months before I'll have to start releasing the package, and my time for major code modifications at this point is quite small. Can't we come up with something that we can all live with and that has a reasonable chance of working when scaled up pretty massively? Thanks much, all. --Lauren--