Subj : Re: ping netmail - Does M
To   : G00R00
From : PSI-JACK
Date : Thu Jan 31 2019 07:20 pm

On 09/01/14, g00r00 said the following...
 
 g0> Let me make sure I understand exactly what you're asking for.
 g0> 
 g0> I've never heard of anything keying off of "ping" before.  If someone
 g0> has a handle of "ping" then they would never get netmail!  What has this
 g0> feature?  If I do something like this it probably wouldn't be ping but
 g0> something less likely to be someone's alias.

It's actually in the FTN spec for netmail, adopted about 15~20 years ago, to
help locate routing issues. Learned about it just recently myself from Mark on
Zone1 echomail conferences, as I'm trying to determine root cause for me not
receiving netmail. 

 g0> Anyway...
 g0> 
 g0> You want a message sent to "ping" to be replied to automatically and
 g0> include the PATH kludges, I get that part.  But then what happens to it?
 g0> What do you mean by continuing to send?  Send it to where?  Mystic
 g0> shouldn't be touching netmails that aren't addressed to it ever, except
 g0> to reroute them if needed.

I mean, when I send a netmail to the username "ping" (w/o quotes), to an
address, systems that get that netmail routed to it, if they follow the ping
protocol spec, it creates a new netmail to send back to the origin's sender
name and FTN address with the route path, while not touching the original
netmail, allowing further routing, as necessary, to continue its due course to
the final destination. 

I'll see if I can dig up more info on the actual spec... In fact, I just did..

http://ftsc.org/docs/fts-5001.002

Apparently there's also a PING flag as well in relation to this. 

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