dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) (11/07/87)
(Following up a discussion of how sometimes newsgroup votes can't be
registered because of mail problems due to not finding the right UUCP
route.)
There is one problem with finding an alternative route to certain sites.
If you are using sendmail and smail/pathalias, as many 4.3BSD UUCP
sites probably are, I don't know of a simple way to prevent any
specified address to be rewritten if it has at least one component that
contains dots. The problem is that smail always invokes sendmail if it
finds any domain address component in a UUCP route, and then sendmail
invokes smail with a -r flag forcing rerouting. I know of no simple
way to override this temporarily. (Though I haven't looked at the new
version of smail that was posted to Usenet a few weeks ago.)
Thus, while you can try alternative routes to a site, if you are stuck
with a site that is only reachable via a route that goes via a domain
name, all alternative routes you try may get optimized into the same
thing.
My planned solution is to make smail recognize a special character
(e.g. "+") that would (a) get either stripped or otherwise ignored but
(b) which would tell smail not to do any rerouting. One day I will
implement it and see how it works. Then a user who wants a guarantee
that the local software will not reroute an address need only include a
+ in the address preceding the point beyond which rerouting must not be
done.
(P.S. I did solve another problem: How to avoid very long routes due
to replies to news articles without forcing rerouting on all mail. I
modified smail to force rerouting if the destination route is longer
than a specified threshold, currently set at 60 characters here. This
way most mail doesn't get rerouted unless it is necessary, but a
typical reply to a news article, containing a very long return path,
gets rerouted. So far it seems to work nicely.)
Followups to comp.mail.misc please.
--
Rahul Dhesi UUCP: <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi