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Date: Thu, 24 Jul 1997 14:34:55 -0500 (CDT)
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From: Tony Kimball <Anthony.Kimball@East.Sun.COM>
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Subject: Re: (over)zealous mail bouncing 
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Quoth Jordan K. Hubbard on Thu, 24 July:
: > I beg to differ.  Most machines which may validly receive email do *not*
: > have valid hostnames.  Using the majority-minority rule, *you* lose.
: > That's reality.  
: 
: That's sure news to me - every machine I've dealt with over the last
: couple of years, absolutely without exception, has had a perfectly
: valid hostname.  What twisted kind of reality do you live in? ;-)

I was using 'valid hostname' to mean a physically connected numeric IP
home, since that appeared to be the significance of the context.
Large numbers of mail nodes on bitnet or profs or uucp or fidonet or
vines or netware or exchange or what-have-you don't have that.
Admittedly the numbers are decreasing, but if you don't count PC's and
Mac's using occasional dialup-IP as having valid hostnames (as in many
cases they do not by even the most forgiving of definitions, and in
the remainder do not by some more rigorous definition) I do believe
that the majority of email nodes are without 'valid hostnames'.