On 02-Nov-97 Bill Campbell wrote:
>
> That's the least of the problems. It's the transports and handling things
> like bsmtp and rsmtp that make smail-3.? so useful in a uucp environment.
> Today, most mailers grok internet style addresses so bang paths aren't too
> important.
exim does bsmtp just fine. The problem is that it will not spool it up to
uucp, you have to do it by piping the message to uux. In order to do that, you
have to know which site to spool it to so you need to do a file lookup with the
key being the domain you are sending mail to and the returned data as the name
of the uucp site that you are going to spool it up to.
All exim needs to replace smail in my application is 1) a table where domain ->
uucp sites can be mapped OR ability to look up information in pathalias and 2)
a file (like the /etc/smail/methods/table) file where I can specify a transport
by domain. This is so I can send bsmtp to those that will handle it and spool
it by uucp as usual for those that dont.
I use 4 uucp transports for the most part when sending to uucp sites:
uux
demand
inet_uusmtp
inet_demand_uusmtp
uux is the regular brain-dead transport that I use for brain-dead uucp mail
clients like sendmail or waffle. demand is the same only it starts a uucp
tranaction as soon as I spool the message. inet_uusmtp is bsmtp in internet
format. I have copied the uux transport definition and changed uucp to inet to
make a transport I call uux-dom that I use for most of the sites.
I do not need ability to move !path addressed mail. As a matter of fact, I see
it as a great security hole. Say some Spamford Wallace decides to route mail
like this:
my-uucp-neighbor!any-isp!some-user@???
If I am running smail, I see that the mail is destined for my-uucp-neighbor who
I happily relay mail for. I shoot the mail there using a demand transport (i.e.
it gets there really quick). Once there, it is determined that the mail is
bound for any-isp!some-user. Since I am the internet gateway for that site, the
mail comes right back (in less than half a second) and goes out to the internet.
>
> I doubt that there are many multi-hop uucp addresses functioning now, but
> that most are similar to our seaslug.org domain where most of the ``hosts''
> are sites that connect directly via uucp for their mail. While most of our
> uucp connections are local, we have some members of the Seattle Unix Group
> who are as far away as New Zealand who connect with uucp over TCP.
I have sites in sweden, australia, canada and all over the US as well as dialup
UUCP neighbors. Where ISP connectivity is expensive, I can MX for someones
domain and they can grab their mail whenever suits them via UUCP over TCP/IP
and even gateway mail for friends or familly that are a local to them. UUCP
over TCP/IP is a great resource multiplier. One individual can collect mail at
irregular intervals for an entire rural community and have the recipients dial
in to collect it or initiate UUCP dialouts to the recipients when mail has
arrived. UUCP is too useful of a resource to be ignored.
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