[ih] The Atlantic on Email

[Craig Partridge]

"John Levine" writes:
> >that both were used in Internet mail.  Of course, "!" was used in uucp
> >routing "bang paths" (not on the Internet except as the
> >pseudo-local-part associated with a gateway)
> 
> I'm reasonably sure I know people who did uucp over TCP/IP, but for
> most of us, the faster we could get rid of our bang paths the better.
> 
> For several years there was a project that maintained a distributed
> uucp connection database so if you sent mail to decvax!bob or
> bob at decvax.uucp, your MTA could rewrite it to
> moe!larry!curly!decvax!bob.

Yes. The program was called Pathalias and was created by Honeyman and
Bellovin.  It ran over a map of the UUCP connectivity and if memory
serves right, the administration of the map was eventually done by
Mark Horton at Berkeley.

As I recall, Pathalias was smart about the capacity of different
connections and would seek to route you along the uucp high powered
nodes (what we'd now call a backbone).  So the typical path was
more likely ihnp4!decvax!bob :-)

Craig