matt@oddjob.uchicago.edu (Matt Crawford) (05/03/89)
For a long time now I've been configuring mailers that I touch to "short circuit" bang paths by skipping ahead to the rightmost fully qualified domain name. An occasional look at the queues and logs shows that this practice is saving people many hops and sometimes several days on their mail. But in the last week there have been two independent instances of this practice leading to loops. Both times involved mail to a off-internet site which had a domain name and a single MX record, and both of the mail exchangers sent the mail by UUCP to oddjob with a bang path that included the full domain name. Bang went the mail, back to the listed mail exchanger. I'm sure the quick and popular answer to this problem is "when the listed first hop is a valid connection, take it." But I could counter- argue that the mail exchanger for the target site was poorly chosen if my own site is closer to the target than the exchanger is. (In point of fact, in both cases the generated bang path had more internet sites on it than just mine.) I solicit opinions from anyone who has spent three years or more maintaining mailers in mixed-network environments. ________________________________________________________ Matt Crawford matt@oddjob.uchicago.edu