Re: Address

[Mabry Tyson <TYSON@warbucks.ai.sri.com>]

Many sites have chosen to make one of their hosts have an alias that is
equivalent to their domain name (eg, SRI.COM is KL.SRI.COM).  Most mail
systems expect that the global part of a mail address (that part after
the "@") will be a host (although this assumption was invalidated when
the domain system was specified).

I would suggest that Symbolics consider making SYMBOLICS.COM to be an alias
for, say, RIVERSIDE.SCRC.SYMBOLICS.COM.  Until they do, or all the mail systems
around are fixed, I found it convenient to make SYMBOLICS.COM be a nickname
of INTERNET|RIVERSIDE.SCRC.SYMBOLICS.COM.

On another point, we are a site that has Internet access but we do not
use Dialnet at all.  Replying (on a 3600) to mail from a dialnet host
has always been a problem because I would have to manually enter the
address.  (ie, replying to a note from FOO@BAR.DIALNET.SYMBOLICS.COM
required me to change the address to 
FOO%BAR.DIALNET.SYMBOLICS.COM@RIVERSIDE.SCRC.SYMBOLICS.COM.)

I recently came across a way that appears to relieve that particular problem.
The distributed SYS:SITE;PUBLIC-DIALNET-REGISTRY.TEXT has in it a
	(:HOST "SCRC-RIVERSIDE" ...)
	(:DOMAIN "SCRC.Symbolics.COM" ...)
I made no change to it.  However, I have a 
SYS:SITE;PRIVATE-DIALNET-REGISTRY.TEXT (in package DIAL) that has in it the
lines

	;This says how to get to DIAL|SCRC-RIVERSIDE (which was added in PUBLIC...)
(:host "SCRC-RIVERSIDE" :LOCAL-NAME "INTERNET|SCRC-RIVERSIDE")
	;This says all DIALNET mail goes there.
(:domain "DIALNET.SYMBOLICS.COM" :host "DIAL|SCRC-RIVERSIDE")


The first form says to use the address INTERNET|SCRC-RIVERSIDE (you may need
INTERNET|SCRC-RIVERSIDE.ARPA) to get to DIAL|SCRC-RIVERSIDE.  The second form
says to send all mail to a Dialnet address to DIAL|SCRC-RIVERSIDE.

I've only used this in the past week or so (and haven't rebooted our mailer
hosts) so I don't have complete confidence that it works perfectly, but
it seems to have worked so far.

I would expect all this will change in 7.2 but maybe it will help people out
until then.  From non-Symbolics hosts, you probably would still have to
manually specify the routing for mail to DIALNET hosts.