Princeton University  had a problem whereby  we did not wish  to require fully
qualified  mail addresses  for e-mail  within the  local domain.  This brought
about  the   problem  with  listserv   not  being  able  to   discern  between
Princeton.EDU and .BITNET  mail for nodenames of eight characters  or less, of
which there are several conflicts in name to this date. As Eric had stated, he
was here for a few days and we had discussed this problem at length. There was
no  simple solution  given  that  this was  a  policy  decision for  Princeton
University.  It was  understood  that  there are  also  other  sites that  are
listserv backbone  sites that WILL see  the same problems experienced  here at
Princeton. So, even if Princeton University were to switch internally to using
fully qualified addresses for internal e-mail (which has been recently decided
it will  do), it is still  necessary to institute  such code for the  whole of
BITNET. Now,  if we really wanted  to solve this  problem we in the  US should
strongly petition the  new CREN board to  lobby for a blanket  domain name for
the BITNET  network, maybe  something as ugly  as nodename.CREN.EDU?  We could
have Harvard and Berkeley  provide MX support. This opens up  a serious can of
worms of politics and technical problems. What would we do for the rest of the
BITNET network?  EARN? NETNORTH?  This gets incredibly  political and  this is
where my  participation in this highly  political issue ends. Too  many people
wanting too things for too many reasons.
 
Although .BITNET is not an official network it is my understanding that a VERY
large portion of Internet/UUCP sites support  .BITNET in some form (by sending
all .BITNET to a local or official INTERBIT gateway).
 
Hope this information sheds some light on the subject.
 
/mrg