greid@adobe.com (Glenn Reid) (06/01/89)
In article <6982@cbnews.ATT.COM> mark@cbnews.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) writes: >In networking, there are three key concepts: names, addresses, and routes. > >A "name" is a high level, user guessable way to identify a person, >machine, or other entity. For example, "Mark Horton". Names may >be ambiguous, especially when abbreviated "M Horton". Names can be >made unambiguous by adding more information. "Mark Randolph Horton >who works for AT&T in Columbus Ohio and whose SSN is 1234567890" > >An "address" is a medium level, unambiguous way to identify *where >something is*. For example, "Room 234, 1234 Main St, Columbus Ohio, USA". >Addresses depend on the underlying technology, and one entity can have >several addresses, e.g. postal, latitude/longitude. > >A "route" amounts to giving directions to get to an address. >"Get on I-70 eastbound, drive to Columbus and take the 4th street >offramp, turn north on 4th, turn east on Main, drive until you see >a building with 1234 on it, park the car, go in the side door, up >the stairs to the 2nd floor, down the B hallway to room 234." >Routes tend to be different, depending on where the entity following >the directions is starting from. Routes are usually tied to the >underlying technology. ...and a large amount of other helpful, true stuff. I read this message and essentially agreed with everything Mark said. But then a thought started brewing in my mind. A thought that is rooted in the fact that a lot more of my mail has been bouncing recently than ever before. A thought that embraces heterogeneity, anarchy, shifts in the political winds, backbones, byte limits, and real worlds in general. A thought that makes me question whether you can really "solve" this problem. Let's say you start with a fully qualified name and address, like Joe_User@Host.Domain.NETWORK. This can then be resolved into an actual route by a mail router that finds the appropriate stuff in its tables, and the mail can be delivered to Joe_User. However, it seems that 30% of the time, Joe_User cannot reply to the mail, because the routing is sometimes non-deterministic and may in fact not be reversible. The "From:" and other lines in the mail are almost certainly rewritten by partially damaged software along the way. Also, my name and address may not be in his host table, or my router doesn't know about JANET or the domain for New Zealand or whatever. So the mail bounces. The bangity!bangity!user stuff is pretty crude, but it was very reliable in terms of reversing the path and getting mail returned to the sender. That's valuable, in my opinion. And sorely missed in today's world. Glenn Reid Adobe Systems
karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (06/01/89)
greid@adobe.com writes:
The bangity!bangity!user stuff is pretty crude, but it was very
reliable in terms of reversing the path and getting mail returned to
the sender.
I respectfullly disagree. I refer you to the footnote in my previous
posting regarding non-reversability of paths going through my archive
machine osu-cis as used by anonymous UUCP accessors. Bidirectional
links are *not* universal. They never have been.
--Karl
stevea@laidbak.UUCP (Steve Alexander) (06/01/89)
In article <882@adobe.UUCP> greid@adobe.COM (Glenn Reid) writes: > >The bangity!bangity!user stuff is pretty crude, but it was very >reliable in terms of reversing the path and getting mail returned to >the sender. That's valuable, in my opinion. And sorely missed in >today's world. > >Glenn Reid >Adobe Systems Well, when I started using this stuff (about 7 years ago), the network was much smaller, so that may be why it used to seem better. As others have pointed out, it's typically only mixing addresses that generate the confusion. The more hosts and networks that get added, the higher the chance that something won't get where it's going. But even in ``the good old days,'' there were links that didn't work consistently, whether they were unidirectional, or news-only. -- Steve Alexander, TCP/IP Development | stevea%laidbak@sun.com Lachman Associates, Inc. | ...!sun!laidbak!stevea
art@felix.UUCP (Art Dederick) (06/01/89)
In article <882@adobe.UUCP> greid@adobe.COM (Glenn Reid) writes: >The bangity!bangity!user stuff is pretty crude, but it was very >reliable in terms of reversing the path and getting mail returned to >the sender. That's valuable, in my opinion. And sorely missed in >today's world. I agree and why in the h___ did it have to change? If it isn't broken, don't fix it. Art D. felix!art
mark@cbnews.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) (06/02/89)
In article <882@adobe.UUCP> greid@adobe.COM (Glenn Reid) writes: >The bangity!bangity!user stuff is pretty crude, but it was very >reliable in terms of reversing the path and getting mail returned to >the sender. That's valuable, in my opinion. And sorely missed in >today's world. That's why RFC976 says that there's supposed to be BOTH a return address or name and a return route in the header: From cblpf!mark <date> remote from att From: mark@cblpf.att.com (Mark Horton) The remote from is ugly, but necessary for upward compatibility. By the time it arrives in your mailbox, it probably looks like From att!cblpf!mark <date> From: mark@cblpf.att.com (Mark Horton) As a rule, you can reply using either the From_ line (the route) or the From: line (the address or name.) Mail/mailx, for example, uses r for one and R for the other (possibly flipped.) The return route is also needed for upward compatibility, as well as redundancy and troubleshooting. Most of the time, you can just reply using the From: line and get the right result. Every once in awhile something is broken in the header you get, and you get a broken From: line and have to reply using the From_ line. For example, mail through sun (and some other places) arrives looking like From: sun!dasnet!user and since I'm not directly connected to sun, the reply bounces. (Some sites smart-host to figure out who sun is, our software doesn't.) There is still much turmoil in the email world. There are lots of broken mailers out there. And while the world is clearly building momentum around RFC822 domains and getting its act together to support them, X.400 and X.500 are starting to build critical mass. Throw billing into the picture (who is going to pay for the mail from random UUCP sites into the commercial X.400 world?) and the whole picture gets a lot messier. Gives all us postmasters something to do to earn our paychecks. Mark
wisner@mica.Berkeley.EDU (Bill Wisner) (06/03/89)
(Mark Horton) >As a rule, you can reply using either the From_ line (the route) >or the From: line (the address or name.) Mail/mailx, for example, >uses r for one and R for the other (possibly flipped.) The return >route is also needed for upward compatibility, as well as redundancy >and troubleshooting. Eh? Last I used mailx, the difference between r and R is that one replies to the sender only and one replies to everyone named in Cc:s as well as the sender. It always used the From_ return route. To reply to the address given in a From: line I'd have to edit the address manually. Of course, mailx has many more problems than that, and I was happy to punt it..
mrm@sceard.COM (M.R.Murphy) (06/03/89)
In article <7050@cbnews.ATT.COM> mark@cbnews.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) writes: [much stuff deleted so that I can ask a question about what's bugging me...] >Most of the time, you can just reply using the From: line and get >the right result. Every once in awhile something is broken in the >header you get, and you get a broken From: line and have to reply >using the From_ line. For example, mail through sun (and some other >places) arrives looking like > From: sun!dasnet!user >and since I'm not directly connected to sun, the reply bounces. >(Some sites smart-host to figure out who sun is, our software doesn't.) > Ours does figure out who sun is, but that's not my problem. That's a relatively well-formed rewrite. Not meaning to pick on sun specifically, I continue, why rewrite the From: anyhow? In all this thread I haven't seen any reason for rewrite of From:. I now reason by analogy, which may be specious, but why not. Suppose I address a postal card. And, somewhere on the card, I put From: Mike Murphy 544 South Pacific Street San Marcos, CA 92069 USA and I send it to somebody in East Nowhere. Not picking on East specifically:-) The Postal Authorities may change the To address or the route or whatever, so long as they deliver it to the addressee, I'm satisfied. They do that here with a neat little yellow sticker where the ink smears. They may want to pencil in a suggestion that my From: return address stinks and the addressee may want to try another route. They would normally do that when said addressee tries to respond and they return to sender (read as bounce) the mail. Then the responder can try again if they want to spend another stamp. But, and this is finally the point, I think that it borders on rude for them to mung my From: address just because they happen to have a marking pen. Even more so when they fix it real good so the responder can't respond, eh? --- Mike Murphy Sceard Systems, Inc. 544 South Pacific St. San Marcos, CA 92069 mrm@Sceard.COM {hp-sdd,nosc,ucsd,uunet}!sceard!mrm +1 619 471 0655
rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) (06/03/89)
In article <882@adobe.UUCP> greid@adobe.COM (Glenn Reid) writes: >The bangity!bangity!user stuff is pretty crude, but it was very reliable ... In <99688@felix.UUCP> art@felix.UUCP (Art Dederick) writes: >I agree and why in the h___ did it have to change? If it isn't >broken, don't fix it. If it worked, than all the sites that are moving domainist would be sticking with bang paths. There's no conspiracy, no organization that can force UUCP sites to do anything. It's just that individual sites, in large numbers, are finding the domain scheme a better way to do things than an explicit-route scheme. I'm explaining this poorly, but if you think about the lack of formal structure in UUCP-land and the changing world, than it seems obvious that we're seeing Darwinism in action. /r$ -- Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rsalz@uunet.uu.net.
brian@ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor) (06/05/89)
Network Working Group Craig Partridge Request for Comments: 974 CSNET CIC BBN Laboratories Inc January 1986 MAIL ROUTING AND THE DOMAIN SYSTEM Status of this Memo This RFC presents a description of how mail systems on the Internet are expected to route messages based on information from the domain system described in RFCs 882, 883 and 973. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Introduction The purpose of this memo is to explain how mailers are to decide how to route a message addressed to a given Internet domain name. This involves a discussion of how mailers interpret MX RRs, which are used for message routing. Note that this memo makes no statement about how mailers are to deal with MB and MG RRs, which are used for interpreting mailbox names. Under RFC-882 and RFC-883 certain assumptions about mail addresses have been changed. Up to now, one could usually assume that if a message was addressed to a mailbox, for example, at LOKI.BBN.COM, that one could just open an SMTP connection to LOKI.BBN.COM and pass the message along. This system broke down in certain situations, such as for certain UUCP and CSNET hosts which were not directly attached to the Internet, but these hosts could be handled as special cases in configuration files (for example, most mailers were set up to automatically forward mail addressed to a CSNET host to CSNET-RELAY.ARPA). Under domains, one cannot simply open a connection to LOKI.BBN.COM, but must instead ask the domain system where messages to LOKI.BBN.COM are to be delivered. And the domain system may direct a mailer to deliver messages to an entirely different host, such as SH.CS.NET. Or, in a more complicated case, the mailer may learn that it has a choice of routes to LOKI.BBN.COM. This memo is essentially a set of guidelines on how mailers should behave in this more complex world. Readers are expected to be familiar with RFCs 882, 883, and the updates to them (e.g., RFC-973). Partridge [Page 1] RFC 974 January 1986 Mail Routing and the Domain System What the Domain Servers Know The domain servers store information as a series of resource records (RRs), each of which contains a particular piece of information about a given domain name (which is usually, but not always, a host). The simplest way to think of a RR is as a typed pair of datum, a domain name matched with relevant data, and stored with some additional type information to help systems determine when the RR is relevant. For the purposes of message routing, the system stores RRs known as MX RRs. Each MX matches a domain name with two pieces of data, a preference value (an unsigned 16-bit integer), and the name of a host. The preference number is used to indicate in what order the mailer should attempt deliver to the MX hosts, with the lowest numbered MX being the one to try first. Multiple MXs with the same preference are permitted and have the same priority. In addition to mail information, the servers store certain other types of RR's which mailers may encounter or choose to use. These are: the canonical name (CNAME) RR, which simply states that the domain name queried for is actually an alias for another domain name, which is the proper, or canonical, name; and the Well Known Service (WKS) RR, which stores information about network services (such as SMTP) a given domain name supports. General Routing Guidelines Before delving into a detailed discussion of how mailers are expected to do mail routing, it would seem to make sense to give a brief overview of how this memo is approaching the problems that routing poses. The first major principle is derived from the definition of the preference field in MX records, and is intended to prevent mail looping. If the mailer is on a host which is listed as an MX for the destination host, the mailer may only deliver to an MX which has a lower preference count than its own host. It is also possible to cause mail looping because routing information is out of date or incomplete. Out of date information is only a problem when domain tables are changed. The changes will not be known to all affected hosts until their resolver caches time out. There is no way to ensure that this will not happen short of requiring mailers and their resolvers to always send their queries to an authoritative server, and never use data stored in a cache. This is an impractical solution, since eliminating resolver caching would make mailing inordinately expensive. What is more, the out-of-date RR problem should not happen if, when a domain table is changed, Partridge [Page 2] RFC 974 January 1986 Mail Routing and the Domain System affected hosts (those in the list of MXs) have their resolver caches flushed. In other words, given proper precautions, mail looping as a result of domain information should be avoidable, without requiring mailers to query authoritative servers. (The appropriate precaution is to check with a host's administrator before adding that host to a list of MXs). The incomplete data problem also requires some care when handling domain queries. If the answer section of a query is incomplete critical MX RRs may be left out. This may result in mail looping, or in a message being mistakenly labelled undeliverable. As a result, mailers may only accept responses from the domain system which have complete answer sections. Note that this entire problem can be avoided by only using virtual circuits for queries, but since this situation is likely to be very rare and datagrams are the preferred way to interact with the domain system, implementors should probably just ensure that their mailer will repeat a query with virtual circuits should the truncation bit ever be set. Determining Where to Send a Message The explanation of how mailers should decide how to route a message is discussed in terms of the problem of a mailer on a host with domain name LOCAL trying to deliver a message addressed to the domain name REMOTE. Both LOCAL and REMOTE are assumed to be syntactically correct domain names. Furthermore, LOCAL is assumed to be the official name for the host on which the mailer resides (i.e., it is not a alias). Issuing a Query The first step for the mailer at LOCAL is to issue a query for MX RRs for REMOTE. It is strongly urged that this step be taken every time a mailer attempts to send the message. The hope is that changes in the domain database will rapidly be used by mailers, and thus domain administrators will be able to re-route in-transit messages for defective hosts by simply changing their domain databases. Certain responses to the query are considered errors: Getting no response to the query. The domain server the mailer queried never sends anything back. (This is distinct from an answer which contains no answers to the query, which is not an error). Getting a response in which the truncation field of the header is Partridge [Page 3] RFC 974 January 1986 Mail Routing and the Domain System set. (Recall discussion of incomplete queries above). Mailers may not use responses of this type, and should repeat the query using virtual circuits instead of datagrams. Getting a response in which the response code is non-zero. Mailers are expected to do something reasonable in the face of an error. The behaviour for each type of error is not specified here, but implementors should note that different types of errors should probably be treated differently. For example, a response code of "non-existent domain" should probably cause the message to be returned to the sender as invalid, while a response code of "server failure" should probably cause the message to be retried later. There is one other special case. If the response contains an answer which is a CNAME RR, it indicates that REMOTE is actually an alias for some other domain name. The query should be repeated with the canonical domain name. If the response does not contain an error response, and does not contain aliases, its answer section should be a (possibly zero length) list of MX RRs for domain name REMOTE (or REMOTE's true domain name if REMOTE was a alias). The next section describes how this list is interpreted. Interpreting the List of MX RRs NOTE: This section only discusses how mailers choose which names to try to deliver a message to, working from a list of RR's. It does not discuss how the mailers actually make delivery. Where ever delivering a message is mentioned, all that is meant is that the mailer should do whatever it needs to do to transfer a message to a remote site, given a domain name for that site. (For example, an SMTP mailer will try to get an address for the domain name, which involves another query to the domain system, and then, if it gets an address, connect to the SMTP TCP port). The mechanics of actually transferring the message over the network to the address associated with a given domain name is not within the scope of this memo. It is possible that the list of MXs in the response to the query will be empty. This is a special case. If the list is empty, mailers should treat it as if it contained one RR, an MX RR with a preference value of 0, and a host name of REMOTE. (I.e., REMOTE is its only MX). In addition, the mailer should do no further processing on the list, but should attempt to deliver the message to REMOTE. The idea Partridge [Page 4] RFC 974 January 1986 Mail Routing and the Domain System here is that if a domain fails to advertise any information about a particular name we will give it the benefit of the doubt and attempt delivery. If the list is not empty, the mailer should remove irrelevant RR's from the list according to the following steps. Note that the order is significant. For each MX, a WKS query should be issued to see if the domain name listed actually supports the mail service desired. MX RRs which list domain names which do not support the service should be discarded. This step is optional, but strongly encouraged. If the domain name LOCAL is listed as an MX RR, all MX RRs with a preference value greater than or equal to that of LOCAL's must be discarded. After removing irrelevant RRs, the list can again be empty. This is now an error condition and can occur in several ways. The simplest case is that the WKS queries have discovered that none of the hosts listed supports the mail service desired. The message is thus deemed undeliverable, though extremely persistent mail systems might want to try a delivery to REMOTE's address (if it exists) before returning the message. Another, more dangerous, possibility is that the domain system believes that LOCAL is handling message for REMOTE, but the mailer on LOCAL is not set up to handle mail for REMOTE. For example, if the domain system lists LOCAL as the only MX for REMOTE, LOCAL will delete all the entries in the list. But LOCAL is presumably querying the domain system because it didn't know what to do with a message addressed to REMOTE. Clearly something is wrong. How a mailer chooses to handle these situations is to some extent implementation dependent, and is thus left to the implementor's discretion. If the list of MX RRs is not empty, the mailer should try to deliver the message to the MXs in order (lowest preference value tried first). The mailer is required to attempt delivery to the lowest valued MX. Implementors are encouraged to write mailers so that they try the MXs in order until one of the MXs accepts the message, or all the MXs have been tried. A somewhat less demanding system, in which a fixed number of MXs is tried, is also reasonable. Note that multiple MXs may have the same preference value. In this case, all MXs at with a given value must be tried before any of a higher value are tried. In addition, in the special case in which there are several MXs with the lowest preference value, all of them should be tried before a message is deemed undeliverable. Partridge [Page 5] RFC 974 January 1986 Mail Routing and the Domain System Minor Special Issues There are a couple of special issues left out of the preceding section because they complicated the discussion. They are treated here in no particular order. Wildcard names, those containing the character '*' in them, may be used for mail routing. There are likely to be servers on the network which simply state that any mail to a domain is to be routed through a relay. For example, at the time that this RFC is being written, all mail to hosts in the domain IL is routed through RELAY.CS.NET. This is done by creating a wildcard RR, which states that *.IL has an MX of RELAY.CS.NET. This should be transparent to the mailer since the domain servers will hide this wildcard match. (If it matches *.IL with HUJI.IL for example, a domain server will return an RR containing HUJI.IL, not *.IL). If by some accident a mailer receives an RR with a wildcard domain name in its name or data section it should discard the RR. Note that the algorithm to delete irrelevant RRs breaks if LOCAL has a alias and the alias is listed in the MX records for REMOTE. (E.g. REMOTE has an MX of ALIAS, where ALIAS has a CNAME of LOCAL). This can be avoided if aliases are never used in the data section of MX RRs. Implementors should understand that the query and interpretation of the query is only performed for REMOTE. It is not repeated for the MX RRs listed for REMOTE. You cannot try to support more extravagant mail routing by building a chain of MXs. (E.g. UNIX.BBN.COM is an MX for RELAY.CS.NET and RELAY.CS.NET is an MX for all the hosts in .IL, but this does not mean that UNIX.BBN.COM accepts any responsibility for mail for .IL). Finally, it should be noted that this is a standard for routing on the Internet. Mailers serving hosts which lie on multiple networks will presumably have to make some decisions about which network to route through. This decision making is outside the scope of this memo, although mailers may well use the domain system to help them decide. However, once a mailer decides to deliver a message via the Internet it must apply these rules to route the message. Partridge [Page 6] RFC 974 January 1986 Mail Routing and the Domain System Examples To illustrate the discussion above, here are three examples of how mailers should route messages. All examples work with the following database: A.EXAMPLE.ORG IN MX 10 A.EXAMPLE.ORG A.EXAMPLE.ORG IN MX 15 B.EXAMPLE.ORG A.EXAMPLE.ORG IN MX 20 C.EXAMPLE.ORG A.EXAMPLE.ORG IN WKS 10.0.0.1 TCP SMTP B.EXAMPLE.ORG IN MX 0 B.EXAMPLE.ORG B.EXAMPLE.ORG IN MX 10 C.EXAMPLE.ORG B.EXAMPLE.ORG IN WKS 10.0.0.2 TCP SMTP C.EXAMPLE.ORG IN MX 0 C.EXAMPLE.ORG C.EXAMPLE.ORG IN WKS 10.0.0.3 TCP SMTP D.EXAMPLE.ORG IN MX 0 D.EXAMPLE.ORG D.EXAMPLE.ORG IN MX 0 C.EXAMPLE.ORG D.EXAMPLE.ORG IN WKS 10.0.0.4 TCP SMTP In the first example, an SMTP mailer on D.EXAMPLE.ORG is trying to deliver a message addressed to A.EXAMPLE.ORG. From the answer to its query, it learns that A.EXAMPLE.ORG has three MX RRs. D.EXAMPLE.ORG is not one of the MX RRs and all three MXs support SMTP mail (determined from the WKS entries), so none of the MXs are eliminated. The mailer is obliged to try to deliver to A.EXAMPLE.ORG as the lowest valued MX. If it cannot reach A.EXAMPLE.ORG it can (but is not required to) try B.EXAMPLE.ORG. and if B.EXAMPLE.ORG is not responding, it can try C.EXAMPLE.ORG. In the second example, the mailer is on B.EXAMPLE.ORG, and is again trying to deliver a message addressed to A.EXAMPLE.ORG. There are once again three MX RRs for A.EXAMPLE.ORG, but in this case the mailer must discard the RRs for itself and C.EXAMPLE.ORG (because the MX RR for C.EXAMPLE.ORG has a higher preference value than the RR for B.EXAMPLE.ORG). It is left only with the RR for A.EXAMPLE.ORG, and can only try delivery to A.EXAMPLE.ORG. In the third example, consider a mailer on A.EXAMPLE.ORG trying to deliver a message to D.EXAMPLE.ORG. In this case there are only two MX RRs, both with the same preference value. Either MX will accept messages for D.EXAMPLE.ORG. The mailer should try one MX first (which one is up to the mailer, though D.EXAMPLE.ORG seems most reasonable), and if that delivery fails should try the other MX (e.g. C.EXAMPLE.ORG). Partridge [Page 7]
barnett@crdgw1.crd.ge.com (Bruce G. Barnett) (06/09/89)
In article <882@adobe.UUCP>, greid@adobe (Glenn Reid) writes: >The bangity!bangity!user stuff is pretty crude, but it was very >reliable in terms of reversing the path and getting mail returned to >the sender. That's valuable, in my opinion. And sorely missed in >today's world. You forget about gateways. How would you send mail to someone on some private network that had to be routed thru an internet gateway? And do you REALLY expect the return address to work? I have had to put in several special rules to take mangled DECnet, internet, local, and UUCP addresses into some reasonable internal form so that pure UUCP sites can, I hope, use some of the return paths. I hope I got all of the cases right, but I still find the most goddawful mangled addresses, say bitnet to UUCP to internet to GE DECNET. I recall one so bad that I had no idea what host the message came from. -- Bruce G. Barnett <barnett@crdgw1.ge.com> a.k.a. <barnett@[192.35.44.4]> uunet!crdgw1.ge.com!barnett barnett@crdgw1.UUCP
ulmo@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Brad Allen) (06/10/89)
> I agree and why in the h___ did it have to change? If it isn't > broken, don't fix it. Three things: - It is better to plan ahead than to wait for problems in my book. - Number of UUCP hosts was increasing, so the number of names and the size of the data to keep track of them has gotten too big for most hosts to handle. - The ARPAnet (now the Internet) predates UUCP, is more official than UUCP, ran into these problems (even worse than UUCP did) before UUCP did, and fixed these problems independently of what UUCP did. There are also more Internet hosts than UUCP hosts. Now, it is standard. Remember, fitting into Internet is current trend. Next is ISO. At least with Internet, UUCP is pretty viable, but with ISO UUCP is just going to be plain silly if it works at all. I think the general concensus is "If you want to stay in the dark ages, you have that right."
s160057@castor.ucdavis.edu (What? Me worry?) (06/11/89)
>- Number of UUCP hosts was increasing, so the number of names > and the size of the data to keep track of them has gotten too big > for most hosts to handle. This still is the case. I'm in favor of limiting the number of map entries each organization / person is allowed, to say two or three. The maps files are *not* meant for LAN information, regardless of what the readme file says. There is limited namespace in UUCP's flat world.. >- The ARPAnet (now the Internet) predates UUCP, is more official than UUCP, > ran into these problems (even worse than UUCP did) before UUCP did, > and fixed these problems independently of what UUCP did. > There are also more Internet hosts than UUCP hosts. Now, it is standard. Yet, in this domain-oriented world, the UUCP maps keep tabs on things I consider as important as routing - responsibility, connectivity.. >Remember, fitting into Internet is current trend. Next is ISO. >At least with Internet, UUCP is pretty viable, but with ISO UUCP is just >going to be plain silly if it works at all. You should distinguish between Internet machines, connected with TCP/IP, and machines using registered domains. Few if any .us machines exist on the Internet (I cannot think of any). I think one of the major problems is an inability of small, independent operators to connect to the Internet. Personally, I don't think ISO has a snowball's chance in the United States. At the rate domains are being adopted, things can only get better. "Once an entrenched domainist, always an entrenched domainist.." >I think the general concensus is "If you want to stay in the dark ages, >you have that right." However our machines will retain the right to bounce your mail.. UUCP in its current state is broke. It's up to all of us to fix it. "I'm all lost in the supermarket.." - The Clash / s160057@castor.ucdavis.edu