SEWALL@UCONNVM.BITNET (08/03/87)
Not everyone's mailer includes a "reply to" (mine doesn't) and I'm not prone to messing with it for fear of confusing some of the "postal" code it writes automatically that I don't even understand. At any rate, many of the "reply to" lines I receive aren't registered paths from here to there. I've been trying to figure out a path to Larry Colton at Pacific Bell for about a week. His "reply to" path produces "host unknown" from PSUVAX1. I have now learned fairly straight-forward and simple routes to most nets other than UUCP. I've had several guru's from info-nets@think.com help me with several of them, and they comment that UUCP generally is a puzzle palace. A lot of people tag a "return address" for arpa and UUCP at the end of their messages. Sometimes they include enough to work out a legal address from here, sometimes not. Patt Haring's "reply to" line may or may not work, I checked the path info and found his mail was coming out of dasys1.uucp and, sure enough, that sends mail back to him. If we can help our friends on UUCP figure out and include an address from bitnet, that would solve the problem, but it isn't so easy to do. Even some fairly sophisticated mail users need some help from this end. I discovered from reading all those "Received by" messages that Morgan Davis's stuff was coming out of bigbang.uucp. Sure enough, PSUVAX1 can't find pro-sol, but bigbang can so: user%pro-sol@bigbang.uucp is a useful address not likely to be discovered looking at "reply to" lines. As to info-apple delivery. It sounds like a chain dependent on the weakest link, however, it may be more reliable as well as more efficient in the long run BECAUSE if the "undelivered" mail is a single message from a server, then you or Brint ought to be able to simply send it out to that server a second time. In the end all the mail that gets lost at the arpanet gateway may begin arriving (late perhaps, but it should get there). My reading of the netmap shows only UCONN, YALE, CUNY, and WISC between you and MARIST. If our mail gets fouled up on a short link, what must happen to people a lot of steps away like LSU for instance? Maybe only one copy of the mail is a bit TOO efficient (I take it Queens is part of CUNYVM?). Has Queens been down since the middle of last week? The undelivered mail seems to go back to at least sometime last Thursday. AND I got some BUT NOT ALL of the info-apple mail when the LISTSERV delivery first started (as I recall I got about 1 message in 6). --------------------- ARPA: sewall%uconnvm.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu Murphy A. Sewall BITNET: SEWALL@UCONNVM School of Business Admin. UUCP: ihnp4!psuvax1!UCONNVM.BITNET!SEWALL University of Connecticut