yorick@nmsu.CSNET (10/16/87)
Can any informed person out there tell me what is going on with e-mail to the UK? There seems to have been some radical change in the last month or so completely independent of the general change in destination formats in the US (e.g. com, edu, gov, cs.net and all that). The standard final component @ucl-cs.arpa no longer seems to work as it has for a decade or so. A new format is occuring in UK originating messages, in this list and elsewhere, namely @nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk but that doesnt seem to work as a destination from the US, moreover it is highly confusing as it seems to import the internal UK JANET symbols (ac.uk) into the arpanet address. Since it doesnt work maybe it doesnt matter. There doesnt seem must use asking UK people as they dont know why they can get out as usual but people aree having more trouble reaching them. Another thing is that the preceding part of the UK addresses (e.g. essex.ac.uk) in bloggs%essex.ac.uk@nss.whatever is now being quoted randomly in orogianting headers in both orders e.g. essex.ac.uk and uk.ac.essex. It always used to be the former. Maybe someone in the UK knows what is going on there as it seems that it must be UK rather that US stupidity. I'd be really grateful for any wizard who can tell me either what's going on, or, better still, how to get back to standard reliable transatlantic e-mail. Yorick Wilks. [NSS.CS.UCL.AK.UC seems to have dropped out of the host table at the moment. There is an entry for NS2..., but the socket number differs from [128.41.9.3] and so must be something other than a typo. UCL also has entries for VTEST, TUNNEL, SAM, and TIGER, but not for UCL-CS. As for the problems of the last month, I am beginning to get some leads. The new Arpanet system insists that addresses contain only official host names, and Arpanet hosts will convert aliases to socket numbers if they can't determine the official names. Many Unix systems, though, are still willing to send and receive host aliases, but will reject mail to socket numbers (since such mail in the past has been associated with mailer loops). Mail from an Arpanet host to a Unix host may therefore fail if the Arpanet host tables are not set up exactly right. Many Unix postmasters are not aware of this glitch, or perhaps do not know how to verify and correct the Arpanet host tables. I presume that this has been the case with UCL, although I don't know the nature of their system. I will attempt to get things straightened out if I can get a message through to UCL. -- KIL]