Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: New Host-Requirement RFCs
Message-ID: <1989Oct29.040104.17081@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1989Oct27.212939.11277@agate.berkeley.edu> <KARL.89Oct27222930@cheops.cis.ohio-state.edu> <89Oct27.235825edt.2687@neat.cs.toronto.edu> <1514@intercon.com>
Date: Sun, 29 Oct 89 04:01:04 GMT

In article <1514@intercon.com> amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker) writes:
>... If you want to use source routing, that means that you know
>more about delivering mail than your mail gateway.  This shows that your
>mail gateway is Really And Truly Broken, not that you need to use %s.

No, it merely means that you know more than your gateway.  This is not
an unusual state of affairs outside the cozy little best-case Internet
world.  In the cold, ugly outside world, information about things like
topology changes and new hosts can take quite a while to propagate and
is often incomplete.  In the real world of inter-networking, the gateways
*do not* dependably have the most complete and current information.

>The more people stop supporting the %-hack, the more broken mail gateways
>will become their owners problems, and not the rest of the world's.  This
>will be a Good Thing, as far as I am concerned.

(Modulo the above considerations...)  It is a Good Thing if your objective
is to get the gateways fixed.  It very definitely is not if you are one
of the long-suffering users who has no power over the local gateway and
just wants to get his mail through!  In practice, people tend to have
this strange idea that a mail system should give mail delivery priority
over ideological purity.
-- 
A bit of tolerance is worth a  |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
megabyte of flaming.           | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
