Excerpts from mail: 10-Sep-93 Re: Hypothetically speaking...
t(_dot_)l(_dot_)hansen(_at_)pegasus(_dot_)att(_dot_)c (730)
<< I still don't understand why this (and like-minded print or FAX servers)
<< aren't addressed according to:
<< pager+4159408776(_at_)pagerserver(_dot_)tpc(_dot_)int
<< or even just
<< +4159408776(_at_)pagerserver(_dot_)tpc(_dot_)int
< Scaling. Your proposal makes every message go to thru one single machine,
< bringing it to it's knees. Now or tomorrow. Or yester- day.
Not hardly. Many implementations may force the messages to go through one
single machine, but that is not inherent in the address. AT&T Mail supports
a fax addressing scheme similar to that shown above, and it definitely does
NOT use a single machine to do its fax deliveries.
Dave Crocker did his usual thorough job in addressing this, but I
thought I'd take a stab at being very pithy.
It is incorrect to claim that the "pager+###(_at_)faxhost" approach cannot
easily be made to scale. However, it is (I believe) correct to claim
that it cannot be made to be SEPARATELY ADMINISTERED (e.g. by
competitive paging services) without the creation of considerable new
mechanism. The DNS approach allows scaling and independent
administration without any new mechanism. Now, if AT&T had a monopoly
on paging services, this wouldn't matter...