henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (05/11/89)
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) [mod.note: This reply explains the problem and its cause. I figured it would be a good idea to fill everyone in. - Bill ] >It's been brought to my attention recently by several authors that >they haven't seen their postings to sci.military; in nearly every >case, I did, in fact, post the article. Some authors even wrote >back, noting that they'd seen followups to their postings, but not >the originals. The problem is a long-standing one: setting up the Path line in the headers to point back to the author of the article can guarantee that he never sees it. This is because Path is used for two purposes: as a reply route for dumb mailers, and for loop prevention in news. News will not send an article to a system that is already mentioned in its Path header. The "right" solution is to have everybody get smart mailers, and stop using Path for replies, so Path does not need to point to the author. Unfortunately, this solution is not practical today and will not be practical any time in the foreseeable future, because there are too many dumb mailers out there. An alternative is to try to transform the site names, if they are not so transformed already, to avoid the problem. For example, I see all my postings, because the route I use to send them in includes at least one "smart" mail relayer ("smart" applied to mail relayers is generally a swear word, but in this particular case the misbehavior is convenient) that turns "utzoo" into "zoo.toronto.edu". Since our news feeds know the machine as "utzoo", they're happy to send those articles to us. Unfortunately, site-name transformation is unsafe in the general case. Another alternative is to forget about having the Path line point to the author of an article, and have it point to an account on the moderator's machine, either the submissions address or a special address which returns mail with a note saying "please edit the address if you want the author". None of these solutions is entirely satisfactory. I don't know of any that is. Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu [mod.note: So, my choice is: leave things the way they are, so that people with old, dumb mailers can use the "r"eply function, or change it so people can see their own postings. My feeling is that distribution should be my top priority. If I get a posting from a major site, and it's lost because of this Path: problem, a lot of readers (both at that site, and downstream from it) will miss the article. So, I'll be adding a Path: line which will hopefully solve this problem. Anyone who encounters difficulty replying to messages (your replies will likely be addressed to me, and probably through an unworkable path) might want to beat on their postmaster for a new, improved mailer. - Bill ]