On Sun, 04 Apr 2010 19:01:30 EDT, Steven Bellovin said:
Right, of course -- they had to show the uucp path from a well-known node.
I remember trying to debug a very messy mail routing problem some 25 years ago, which we finally traced back to the fact that pathalias was too smart by half, and some sites were too helpful. My user was trying to send mail to a path 'fluffybunny!whiterabbit!jellybean' or some such - but when the mail left Bitnet via a different gateway than it was expected, the gateway chose the closest fluffybunny to send it to - and when *that* machine forwarded to whiterabbit, and whiterabbit couldn't find jellybean in its UUCP tables, we were most mystified that the bounce messages came back with European timestamps for a box supposedly in the midwest US. There was much kicking of metal trash cans when I finally figured out what happened. ;)