Can not mail off-site, RTFM not much help

David C Lawrence tale at pawl.rpi.edu
Sun Nov 19 12:09:22 AEST 1989


In <89Nov18.122827est.2712 at neat.cs.toronto.edu> lamy at ai.utoronto.ca
(Jean-Francois Lamy) writes:
JF> you can derive an address that has a better chance of working for
JF> you, namely,
JF> 	attcan!utzoo!henry at uunet.uu.net
JF> and because utzoo appears in the UUCP routing data you can shorten that to
JF> 	utzoo!henry at uunet.uu.net
JF> The last address you tried is a common abbreviation used on sites that have
JF> the UUCP routing data available to them; it means look up utzoo in the UUCP
JF> maps and send it there, or send it to a machine that you know can deal with
JF> this.  There is little hope that this would work on your machine.

You should be very careful, however, in mixing ! and @ style addresses.
There is no universally accepted standard (of which I am aware; I am
sure someone will flame me if I am wrong) regarding precedence.  The
only operator used with third-party mailing in @ addresses is "%".
Though many sites understand the above address and will process it as
Jean-Francois describes, other will (not necessarily incorrectly, since
there is no precedence rule) attempt to route the mail through attcan
to utzoo, expecting it to be sent to henry at uunet.uu.net.  If the site
on the rhs of the @ knows where the UUCP site is which you are tring to
reach (as in Jean-Francois's second example) you are probably safer
using %-style notation -- henry%ytzoo.UUCP at uunet.uu.net.

Dave
-- 
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