Can not mail off-site, RTFM not much help

[Jean-Francois Lamy]

nam2254 at dsacg2.UUCP (Tom Ohmer) writes:

>I tried:   uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry   from Henry's .sig
>	   henry at zoo.toronto.edu       "      "      " 
>	   henry at utzoo.uucp            "      "    header From: line 

The second address ought to have worked; the fact that it did not indicates
that your site's mailer is still using the thoroughly useless static hosts
file from nic.ddn.mil instead of querying a domain name server, or is misusing
that data.  zoo.toronto.edu is not directly connected to the internet (real
soon now, though :-), and the domain name server data would have told your
mailer to send that message, as is, to neat.ai.toronto.edu (128.100.1.65)
without you having to worry about further details.  Some machines with
inferior software can not handle such indirection data (called MX records),
and insist on handling things as if all machines in the universe were directly
connected to the Internet and had an Internet address (and the matching A
record in the name server).

To re-emphasize[sic], relying on the hosts file is just asking for trouble.
For instance, out of the 500 hosts on this network, only half-a-dozen appear
in the hosts file (the Network Information Center will only put hosts that run
your name servers in that file).  Using a broken mailer that does not handle
MX records is only slightly less silly,  but at least that might have worked
in this instance.

The first address you tried is most useful for UUCP sites. Given some
additional knowledge like
a) uunet in UUCP land is the same machine as uunet.uu.net on the Internet
b) uunet.uu.net actually appears in the (expletive deleted) hosts file
c) uunet will do something sensible if you give it a UUCP route as the local
   part of the address,
you can derive an address that has a better chance of working for you, namely,
	attcan!utzoo!henry at uunet.uu.net
and because utzoo appears in the UUCP routing data you can shorten that to
	utzoo!henry at uunet.uu.net

The last address you tried is a common abbreviation used on sites that have
the UUCP routing data available to them; it means look up utzoo in the UUCP
maps and send it there, or send it to a machine that you know can deal with
this.  There is little hope that this would work on your machine.

Jean-Francois Lamy               lamy at ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy
AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4