kristoff@GENBANK.BIO.NET (Dave Kristofferson) (04/06/91)
Here's something which may be of interest to those corresponding with
Eastern Europe. However I should add that I have seen this same
problem with many BITNET sites right here in the good old US of A.
Too many BITNET users (RIP) still have their mailers set up so that
their address is written as JOE@FOOBAR instead of JOE@FOOBAR.BITNET.
This makes it much more difficult to respond to their mail and creates
additional problems when they try to use e-mail servers on the
Internet (such as GenBank's). If you have any doubts about how your own
mail looks, address a message to yourself and then look at the From:
line when it arrives back in your mail file. Pray that is
FOOBAR.BITNET and not FOOBAR!! If it is FOOBAR, then it's time to dust
off your sysop.
Dave "take a Byte out of BITNET" Kristofferson
P.S. - you probably have to be American to appreciate these sick
jokes.
---------------
Dear Email User,
You have recently tried to send Email to a BITNET node, which probably
have sent mail to you via the Swedish EARN gateway searn.sunet.se. Many
nodes in eastern europe, which only recently gained access to international
email networks, have problems configuring their mailers correctly.
In particular, RETURN ADDRESSES ARE SELDOM FULLY SPECIFIED. Email can reach
our gateway via many different routes, and we have absolutely no chance to
automatically distinguish between all cases. It is also in general the
responsibility of the originating node to ensure that the return address
is valid. Specifically, Polish BITNET nodes which gateway their Email to
Internet fail to add ".BITNET" to their address. E.g.: The user XYZ on
node PL1234 sends an Email, which after our gateway will have the return
address "XYZ%PL1234@searn.sunet.se" WHICH IS INVALID. Working on the assumption
that PL1234 is indeed a node on the Polish BITNET (which is by no means
possible to make 100 percent sure given only the information in a mail header),
a correct return address would be "XYZ%PL1234.BITNET@searn.sunet.se".
The Subject line of this contains an automatically generated example of
one of the addresses you have tried and a corrected version thereof.
(It is, although, possible that there is a simple spelling error in
the node name (this can not be tested here), in which case the
address quoted is invalid anyway.)
Hope this helps,
(Name deleted to protect the innocent - DK)