[comp.mail.sendmail] Check valves, we called them in the Navy

gmp@rayssd.ray.com (Gregory M. Paris) (06/16/88)

In article <5578@xanth.cs.odu.edu> kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes:
> I notice from news.announce.important that the AT&T portion of the net
> intends to cease forwarding letters transiting their system for
> further points.  Sounds fair.  I hope each organizational entity
> outside AT&T on the net reciprocates in kind for letters originating
> from within the AT&T subnet and attempting an innocent transit of that
> entity's system for points beyond.  That also sounds fair.

Yes, this is exactly the same thing I was thinking.  AT&T will become either
the biggest leaf node or biggest freeloader on the net (oh, excuse me, I guess
the fact that they charge for ATTMAIL and long distance phone calls should
probably disqualify them from the freeloader title).

The big problem is that most of the BSD UNIX systems on the net are running
sendmail, which doesn't provide a way of routing mail based on where it
is coming from (in this case we care about ATT.COM origin).  Maybe somebody
knows a way, or maybe somebody already has a sendmail front-end for this
or similar purpose.  In either case, the appropriate place to discuss this
is comp.mail.sendmail, so I've redirected followups there.

I'm not just blowing smoke here.  I'm interested in putting this kind of
restriction on our mail gateway system.  As long as I can find or figure
a way to do it without disrupting other mail or standing on my head, I'll
probably do it.  Anybody have any ideas they'd like to share...?


-- 
Greg Paris                            <gmp@rayssd.ray.com>
        {decuac,gatech,necntc,sun,uiucdcs,ukma}!rayssd!gmp
"...it could have been a potentially hazardous situation."