kent@happym.UUCP (Kent Forschmiedt) (06/24/88)
In article <897@flatline.UUCP> erict@flatline.UUCP writes: >I've recieved some mail from AT&T employees concerning how >much their long distance bill is, and how many people >put ihnp4 as the start of their UUCP address... So maybe they are >a tad justified in turning into a leaf node. > >I thought most everybody was running pathalias and a mailer that >used it, making .sig paths unneccessary. I wonder if this has occurred to anybody... My Unix system is near-vanilla SVR2. Out of the box, the way AT&T sells it. The mailer that comes with System V is, well, minimal. It is entirely up to the user or an application (like rn or vnews) to generate paths for mail. It is, to say the least, difficult for an inexperienced user, or even an inexperienced sysadmin to get mail delivered to anywhere more than a few hops away with /bin/mail. Mailx doesn't help - the version that I have munges bang addresses and gets completely confused about Internet addresses (At least some of the bugs are documented in the man page...). Basically, the setup sucks. And I wonder... --------------------------------------- Why? --------------------------------------- Why doesn't AT&T include a decent mailer with their operating system? And, yes, include news, with LIBDIR/sys preconfigured to only handle map distribution (after reading the manual, the admin can figure out how to use the rest). If they had done so a few years ago, perhaps fewer people would put {ihnp4, cbosgd, uunet}!... in their signatures, and just put e.g. kent@happym.uucp instead. Maybe if AT&T recognized that they are the source of the least common denominator in Unix, they would recognize that they can make it work any way that they want. How many of the little sites out there are 286 or 386 boxes running SCO Xenix V or Microport SysV? How many SysV based systems are there? And how many, when you paid AT&T for your OS, got a decent mailer, one that could find a route to another site? -- Kent Forschmiedt -- kent@happym.UUCP, tikal!camco!happym!kent Happy Man Corporation 206-282-9598