paul@vixie.UUCP (Paul Vixie Esq) (06/29/87)
In article <41000010@umbio> solejni@umbio.UUCP writes: > >Paul, I would be grateful for assistance with mailing mail to system >HASARA5, in Netherlands. I have no knowledge of e-mail, so if you could >recoommend a source of published information/guidelines/tutorial, I would >be most grateful. Thanks. This is an embarrassing question. Or, better to say that it has an embarrassing answer. You cannot go to a bookstore, or to your UNIX manuals, or to any doc file supplied with most UNIX systems, and expect to find out anything about how the mail network works. There are some useful tutorials on the subject available from as "Nutshell Handbooks", available from "O'Reilly & Associates, Inc; 981 Chestnut Street; Newton, Massachusetts, 02164". These are helpful but cannot be definitive or complete, given the nature of the subject. Most topics are up in the air, highly subject to local preference. The definitive (but as I said above, neccessarily incomplete) treatment are in RFC's, which mean "Request For Comment", which are actually far more than that -- they become the standards, not just "Requests". (If someone more knowledgable than I wants to comment further on the nature of RFC's, I'd love to read it!). RFC text is available via anonymous FTP from the SRI NIC, where NIC is "Network Information Center"; they are the closest thing Internet has to management. If you don't have FTP access (don't feel bad, this is common :-(), you can get some of the more important RFC's in the source kit for Sendmail (if you have source code), or in the source kit for SMAIL (available from a mod.sources archive), or in the archives of the (defunct?) mod.sources.doc group, where the RFCs were posted several years back. As to your specific question, there is a site called "lhasa" which I believe is in the Netherlands; mail to "lhasa!postmaster" to find out more -- I don't know if they're the site you want, but they will :-). According to my pathalias database (which comes from data posted every couple of months to the comp.mail.maps group), "lhasa" talks to "harvard" which I know talks to "ames". If you know a path or a route to "ames", then sending mail to yourpathtoames!ames!harvard!lhasa!postmaster will probably get you what you want; if you are on the DARPA Internet, then postmaster@lhasa%harvard.harvard.edu will probably work. As you can see, you are largely on your own. Good luck. -- Paul A Vixie Esq 329 Noe Street {ptsfa, crash, hoptoad, ucat}!vixie!paul San Francisco ptsfa!vixie!paul@ames.arc.nasa.gov CA 94116 paul@vixie.UUCP (415) 864-7013
sjoerd@cs.vu.nl (Sjoerd Mullender) (06/29/87)
In article <685@vixie.UUCP> paul@vixie.UUCP (Paul Vixie Esq) writes: >In article <41000010@umbio> solejni@umbio.UUCP writes: >>Paul, I would be grateful for assistance with mailing mail to system >>HASARA5, in Netherlands. I have no knowledge of e-mail, so if you could >>recoommend a source of published information/guidelines/tutorial, I would >>be most grateful. Thanks. >As to your specific question, there is a site called "lhasa" which I >believe is in the Netherlands; mail to "lhasa!postmaster" to find out >more -- I don't know if they're the site you want, but they will :-). I don't know about a site lhasa, but I do know about HASARA5. First of all, the machine is called HSARA5, not HASARA5. HSARA5 is a Vax running VMS and they are on bitnet. They talk to mcvax (mcvax.cwi.nl or mcvax.uucp) which is the European (and Dutch) gateway. Mcvax talks to seismo, so if you can get to seismo you're nearly there. If you have a proper mailer (i.e. one that understands mail domains), person@hsara5.bitnet should work, otherwise you'll have to do something like <path to seismo>!seismo!mcvax!hsara5.bitnet!person -- Sjoerd Mullender sjoerd@cs.vu.nl
ghoti+@andrew.cmu.edu (Adam Stoller) (06/30/87)
minor point (perhaps) but I believe that the correct Internet address for: > yourpathtoames!ames!harvard!lhasa!postmaster would not be: > postmaster@lhasa%harvard.harvard.edu but would be; > postmaster%lhasa@harvard.harvard.edu As there has been some discussion recently about the "%" - I figured this was a dandy of an excuse to explain my understanding of it (which comes from stepping into the middle of a mail system with little background before hand, and picking things up as fast as I can (i.e: I can't quote any RFC's for this stuff) The address "postmaster%lhasa@harvard.harvard.edu" basicly says: -Deliver this mail to harvard.harvard.edu and let them deal with what is to the left of the @ -- When it gets to harvard - *they* look at what is to the left of the @ and find: postmaster%lhasa -- I believe at this point there are mechanisms for identifying this as an additional address to route to (as opposed to a local address to deliver locally) and they change the "%" to an "@" and send it to: postmaster@lhasa -- (Now it is possible, that harvard might be able to further understand that lhasa can be (must be?) reached through UUCP - and maybe translates it to a bang address) The point being, that in the Internet each sender is concerned only with what is to the *right* of the "@" and each receiver must determine if they are interested in what is to the *left* of the "@" - if what appears to the left of the "@" is a local address to that machine/site - then it should recognize it and deliver it as such - if it is another address, it dresses it up appropriately (this might mean the simple translation of "%" to "@" - or the translation of Internet to UUCP) - and sends it on it's way. so something like the following might take the following "route" (figuratively speaking): [from A]userfoo%site.bar%site.baz%site.mumble@site.reach.able[to B] [from B]userfoo%site.bar%site.baz@site.mumble[to C] [from C]userfoo%site.bar@site.baz[to D] [from D]userfoo@site.bar[to E] Sorry if this is more confusing than helpful - the initial point though is that the address should be: postmaster%lhasa@harvard.harvard.edu --fish