zben@umcp-cs.UUCP (11/05/83)
[..]
I agree that everyone should use paths which are different from the
paths that news took to get to them. When you use 'r' in readnews,
you get a file whose first line you can edit to amend the header.
Here at UMCP-CS we have a truly wondrous program called 'WHERE-MAIL'.
You say:
% where-mail podunk
and it tells you the path it thinks is best to get to podunk. To forge
a return path, I call it sequentially backwards on the from address,
starting at the final host and working back through the chain, until a
host pops up defined (and usually with a shorter path). I then catenate
the shorter path it printed with the unknown sites that were skipped.
We are connected to a lot of different nets, and I'm not sure how
transportable this system is.
I gave up on the readnews R command long ago -- there seem to be some
*REALLY* funny 'From:' lines out there...
Ben Cranston ...seismo!umcp-cs!zben zben@umd2.ARPAliz@umcp-cs.UUCP (11/05/83)
Another solution is to hack an interface directly to mail. In vnews, someone here has hacked a command "m" which does a "mail -f <article>". That puts you in mail where you can use the mailer's "r" command to reply to the article and the mailer will automatically generate the best route to use. We use mmdf which can take an address like: user@site and turn it into the appropriate ...!site!user if site is a usenet site or send it via the CSNET if the site is an ARPANET host or a CSNET host. Btw, the where-mail program that umcp-cs!zben mentioned was one that I wrote a while back when I was having problems and wondering how mail was being routed. I don't know how transportable it is; it uses the mmdf tables to look up routes, etc. I can mail it to people if they are interested. The code that looks up the usenet tables may be adoptable to other sites -- or you could use the front end of nmail. -Liz -- Liz Allen, Univ of Maryland, College Park MD Usenet: ...!seismo!umcp-cs!liz Arpanet: liz%umcp-cs@CSNet-Relay
swatt@ittvax.UUCP (Alan S. Watt) (11/07/83)
Those of you running "sendmail" can optimize UUCP paths directly
in the mail system. The configuration lines are:
# Define class 'U' to be all those systems with which
# you have a direct UUCP link. Put this stuff up at
# the top where you keep local information. You can
# also use the alternate 'F' directive, to define the
# class as the contents of a file.
CUsys1 sys2 sys3 sys4 sys5 ...
# Down in ruleset 0, just before the call to the UUCP
# mailer. This drops all the prefix systems up to the
# last host which is locally connected.
R$+$=U!$+ $2!$3
This will not optimize paths to systems for which you might know a
better path, but it will route stuff immediately to any locally
connected nodes.
- Alan S. Watt
{decvax, allegra, research, purdue, duke}!swatt