chl@cs.man.ac.uk (Charles Lindsey) (03/05/91)
There are two problems, and my question is whether or how they are related. 1) cs at the top-level is "Czechoslovakia". At the bottom level it is often "computer science". At the time the cs domain appeared there were dire predictions of the consequences of this. 2) In the UK, on Janet, our domains appear backwards (i.e I am @uk.ac.man.cs on Janet, whereas I am @cs.man.ac.uk on the Internet). Gateways usually manage to reverse (most of) the headers in mail messages (and usually do so "correctly"), but various mail systems at individual sites try to be "clever" and guess whether an address is "the wrong way round". So if I send mail to @foo.mich.edu when I should (on Janet) have said @edu.mich.foo, it probably gets there anyway. But clearly if I send it to @cs.mich.edu it may well guess wrong. Now, I had always been led to believe that the 'cs' ambiguity was purely a product of the UK back-to-front nonsense, and the attempts of UK mailers to be "helpful" - in which case the ambiguity would not occur in the Internet. Clearly, the UK nonsense makes the problem worse. but I am no longer so sure that it is the only cause. I recently had some mail to Switzerland (domain ch) returned "User Unknown" from our own Chemistry Department, and in trying to figure out what had happened and whether the UK reversal was to blame, I could not see how the problem could have been prevented even without the reversal problem. But the UK problem muddies the waters so much that I need to ask the question in a more straightforward (i.e. pure Internet) environment. So here is a question which I hope someone in North America can answer. Suppose there are two machines foo and bar in the computer science department at mich.edu. If I sit on foo and direct mail to 'fred@bar.cs.mich.edu', then presumably it arrives without question. But presumably there is a convention at mich.edu that top-level domain information can be omitted for local mail. So (presumably foo knows about bar) I can mail 'fred@bar'. BUT what happens if I mail 'fred@bar.cs', or 'fred@h2so4@ch' (presumably mich.edu has a chemistry department as well, and I don't suppose foo would know about h2so4). What stops my mail going to Czechoslovakia (or Switzerland), and what happens if there really is a machine known as bar in Czechoslovakia, and I really do want to mail my friend fred there? Replies by email please, and I will summarise anything that looks interesting.
d90-gog@sm.luth.se (G|ran berg) (03/07/91)
chl@cs.man.ac.uk (Charles Lindsey) writes: >1) cs at the top-level is "Czechoslovakia". At the bottom level it is often >"computer science". At the time the cs domain appeared there were dire >predictions of the consequences of this. Isn't the true origin of cs "Computing Science" ? /Pro/