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From: gjm@ihnp4.UUCP (Gary J. Murakami)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: flame on misguided smartness in mailers
Message-ID: <541@ihnp4.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 5-Feb-84 19:27:37 EST
Article-I.D.: ihnp4.541
Posted: Sun Feb  5 19:27:37 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 8-Feb-84 09:50:20 EST
References: <3515@utzoo.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL
Lines: 36

I appreciate Henry's position, there are some cases in which explicit
routing is needed, for instance, in queuing up a poll from other sites.
There are better ways to do polling, like getting your friendly
neighbor to set up a regular polling schedule.

However, the news software produces extraordinarily long uucp addresses,
sometimes taking a dozen hops where one is sufficient.  This inefficiency
costs real money and real time.  One (poor) response could be to reject
messages with addresses longer than 4 (arbitrary) hops.

Instead paths are optimized so that we can continue to provide service
at reasonable cost and with improved speed.  Also, many AT&T-BL sites do
rightmost neighbor optimization because they were forced to do so
in order to reduce the load across systems in the netnews paths.

There are several solutions to enable explicit routing.

A) You could donate money to AT&T and other friendly companies so that
we can buy more systems and pay larger phone bills to bounce the mail
around from system to system.

B) We could try to force each system to have a (pathalias) mail router,
and then have news generate replies to host!user rather than to
long-path!host!user.

C) We can work on establishing domain addressing across the network, and
then have news generate replies to user@host.domain.  Note that RFC822
also has an explicit routing syntax for domain addresses.

The current direction of the net seems to be in the direction of method
(C).  We would welcome help in accomplishing this development.


Gary Murakami
AT&T Bell Laboratories
ihnp4!gjm