Ben Aitchison
Why's UUCP so evil? It's the best suited solution here. SMTP with ETRN is rather a hack. UUCP is a solution that works well for non well-connected hosts such as dial-up users.
Well, if all you want is email, then uucp works just fine. Except that it's a whole bunch of stuff most ISPs don't want to deal with anymore, especially on their dialup servers. (Is this a PPP call or a uucp call?) You can of course run uucp over TCP, but that means running an error correcting protocol over an already reliable protocol. In a word, yuck. Many, many moons ago, I used a hybrid of both -- I used uucp for all mail to my domain; when I had my (rather hacky) 14.4 kbps dialup IP connection active, the uucp client would connect to the uucp server over TCP, other times it would do a normal uucp dialout. Like I said: yuck. Around '94 or so I put in a leased line with 28.8 kbps modems, switched the mail to SMTP and was *much* happier ...
That said, SMTP w/ ETRN fits in a lot easier with a lot of US-centric software that assumes the user is always connected.
Well, it fits better with the Internet. Internet protocols generally do. -- don --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog