Why can't I use UUNET's smail? Smail for Xenix worthwhile?
Mark McWiggins
mark at intek01.UUCP
Thu Sep 8 12:12:10 AEST 1988
I recently had cause to send E-mail to user "macsmith at athena.mit.edu" on
ARPAnet for the first time, and since UUNET has smail and I'm directly
connected, I thought "no problem", it's just:
uunet!macsmith at athena.mit.edu
But that didn't work. So I posted a note to comp.unix.questions (the wrong
place, I'm told) asking "How do I send mail to ARPA?" and got back replies
uunet!macsmith%athena.mit.edu
and
uunet!athena.mit.edu!macsmith
and
uunet!macsmith%athena.mit.edu.ARPA at UUNET.UU.NET
and one or two others, all of which I tried and none of which
worked.
I don't understand why not. I thought the idea of smail was to let you
address email by user at site.domain; if I get my mail to uunet, why doesn't
its smail take over from there? Is there a "precedence" problem; that is,
does uunet!macsmith always parse as SITE "macsmith"? And is there a way
around this?
Even if there is, is there some compelling reason I should be running smail
myself on my single-user 286 Xenix box? Is there some tweak needed to make
the standard smail distribution work with 286 Xenix?
I had been half-following the 'smail-and-domain-registry' discussion in
comp.mail.uucp not thinking it applied much to me, so ... forgive me if
I'm treading well-worn ground, and thanks in advance.
--
Mark McWiggins UUCP: uunet!intek01!mark
DISCLAIMER: I could be wrong. INTERNET: intek01!mark at uunet.uu.net
(206) 455-9935
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