jbeard@quintus.UUCP (Jeff Beard) (04/11/90)
I'm told that a better form of my e-mail address is as follows:
jbeard%quintus.com@sun.com
Again, apologies to !misc.jobs.offered groups.
--
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Opinions are the possession of the speaker and to assert otherwise is plagiarism.
Jeff Beard, Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
e-mail ...!sun!quintus!jbeard or jbeard%quintus.com@sun.com jbeard@quintus.UUCP (Jeff Beard) (04/11/90)
I'm told that a better form of my e-mail address is as follows:
jbeard%quintus.com@sun.com
Again, apologies to !misc.jobs.offered groups.
--
======
Opinions are the possession of the speaker and to assert otherwise is
plagiarism.
Jeff Beard, Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
e-mail ...!sun!quintus!jbeard or jbeard%quintus.com@sun.comKLENSIN@INFOODS.MIT.EDU (John C Klensin) (04/11/90)
Jeff, I'm going to post this to the list on the theory that the principle, if not the specific details, may be of general interest (again). >I'm told that a better form of my e-mail address is as follows: > jbeard%quintus.com@sun.com "quintus.com" is a registered Domain Name System name on the Internet. This makes the "better" form of your e-mail address (as well as the simple and obvious one) jbeard@quintus.com Now, where does "sun.com" come in? At the moment, mail addressed to quintus.com (as above) from the Internet is sent--automatically, by the mail sending software--to "sun.com" which acts as a Mail eXchanger for "quintus.com". But, users sending mail to you don't need to know that, and *shouldn't* know and remember that. Why? Well, if quintus ever changes its connectivity, or an additional Mail eXchanger becomes available, this can be reflected in easily updated (distributed and dynamic) tables, retaining the name, while use of %quintus.com@sun.com specifies a connectivity and a routing, which is, in general, a bad idea. This address should also work from BITNET, as the use of the domain ".COM", if not found otherwise, will route the mail to a BITNET->Internet gateway. All of the correctly-functioning ones of those are able to figure out what to do with "@quintus.com" and do it; any that are not correctly-functioning should be corrected. Generalization and moral: Use addresses of the form user%host@domain only when absolutely necessary, i.e., when "host" is *not* a registered Internet domain name. If "host" is a registered Internet domain name, use of the user%hostdomain@gatewaydomain form, rather than the user@hostdomain form, does not add any addressing or performance advantages, and tends to cause long-term addressing problems as networks and connections evolve. --john Klensin@MIT.EDU -------
scw@ollie.SEAS.UCLA.EDU (04/13/90)
In article <9004111551.AA15231@lilac.berkeley.edu> John C Klensin <KLENSIN@INFOODS.MIT.EDU> writes: >Jeff, > I'm going to post this to the list on the theory that the principle, if >not the specific details, may be of general interest (again). > >> [A reference to a source routed mail address] >> jbeard%quintus.com@sun.com > >"quintus.com" is a registered Domain Name System name on the Internet. >This makes the "better" form of your e-mail address (as well as the simple >and obvious one) > jbeard@quintus.com > > [ A rather long comment that source routing is NOT-A-GOOD-THING-TO-DO ] John, The problem is that the people who are most likley to have the skills wanted here (System/370) are the most likley to be running mailers that wouldn't know an MX record from a RC11 (a 256K word (16 bit) disk drive). Please remember that not everyone in the world runs up to date software. (mumble cusss...) Even if they'd like to budget constraints may prohibit, and manpower constraints (or lack of source) may make rewriting unfeasable. ----- Stephen C. Woods; UCLA SEASNET; 2567 BH;LA CA 90024; (213)-825-8614 UUCP: ...!{ibmsupt,hao!cepu}!ollie}!scw ARPA:scw@{Ollie.,}SEAS.UCLA.EDU
scw@ucla-seas.UUCP (04/13/90)
In article <9004111551.AA15231@lilac.berkeley.edu> John C Klensin <KLENSIN@INFOODS.MIT.EDU> writes: >Jeff, > I'm going to post this to the list on the theory that the principle, if >not the specific details, may be of general interest (again). > >> [A reference to a source routed mail address] >> jbeard%quintus.com@sun.com > >"quintus.com" is a registered Domain Name System name on the Internet. >This makes the "better" form of your e-mail address (as well as the simple >and obvious one) > jbeard@quintus.com > > [ A rather long comment that source routing is NOT-A-GOOD-THING-TO-DO ] John, The problem is that the people who are most likley to have the skills wanted here (System/370) are the most likley to be running mailers that wouldn't know an MX record from a RC11 (a 256K word (16 bit) disk drive). Please remember that not everyone in the world runs up to date software. (mumble cusss...) Even if they'd like to budget constraints may prohibit, and manpower constraints (or lack of source) may make rewriting unfeasable. ----- Stephen C. Woods; UCLA SEASNET; 2567 BH;LA CA 90024; (213)-825-8614 UUCP: ...!{ibmsupt,hao!cepu}!ollie}!scw ARPA:scw@{Ollie.,}SEAS.UCLA.EDU
KLENSIN@INFOODS.MIT.EDU (John C Klensin) (04/13/90)
Stephen C. Woods writes: > The problem is that the people who are most likley to have the skills >wanted here (System/370) are the most likley to be running mailers that >wouldn't know an MX record from a RC11 (a 256K word (16 bit) disk drive). > >Please remember that not everyone in the world runs up to date software. >(mumble cusss...) Even if they'd like to budget constraints may prohibit, and >manpower constraints (or lack of source) may make rewriting unfeasable. Stephen, I'm a lot more sympathetic to this problem than I often sound. But the bottom line is... -> Internet hosts (other than MILNET) have been *required* to run with full DNS support for *years*. "Required" doesn't mean all do, but it does imply some obligations to do so or incur the "costs" of not doing so. -> Similarly, gateways are supposed to handle things so that the conventions of the networks which they support can be adhered to. user@domain is the only reasonable and appropriate address, on the Internet, for a host for which 'domain' is valid. If, in the transition to mumblenet, a gateway has to transform that to something else, nothing that I said should be construed to prohibit that. -> There are positive technical advantages -- again, within the Internet -- to using MXs rather than explicit routes. At some level, the "real" question is whether (i) The people who are running current and rule-conforming software should be hampered, penalized, or inconvenienced because there are sites that don't. or (ii) The sites that run obsolete or non-conforming software (for whatever reason) should be inconvenienced while the sites that conform get optimal behavior. While I would not suggest that the level of inconvenience in the second case should be made any worse than the situation requires, I think it is very difficult to make a convincing argument for the first. --john Klensin@MIT.EDU p.s.: Please note that the following, which arrived in your message, is usually cited as the classic example of an address form that no one knows how to parse. It will get you into a lot of trouble whose symptoms will be people being unable to reply to your mail, and is worth fixing, whatever that takes: > From: ucla-seas!scw%CS.UCLA.EDU@mitvma.mit.edu It *is* one of the natural consequences of trying to source-route; what probably happened here was that the bang-route "ucla-seas!scw@CS.UCLA.EDU" arrived at the BITNET->Internet gateway "mitvma.mit.edu", which "fixed" it into the form above, following the exact rules we have been discussing. The problem is that there is no established precedence rule about ! and %, so the above can be construed as (at least): (i) ucla-seas!scw at CS.UCLA.EDU via mitvma.mit.edu (probably what was intended) or as (ii) scw%CS.UCLA.EDU at ucla-seas via mitvma.mit.edu -------