[now historical] An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address specifying
hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to the addressee, so
called because each {hop} is signified by a {bang} sign. Thus, for
example, the path ...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me directs people to
route their mail to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known location
accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine foovax to
the account of user me on barbox.
In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers
and Internet became commonplace, people often published compound bang
addresses using the { } convention (see {glob}) to give paths from
several big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be
able to get mail to one of them reliably (example: ...!{seismo,
ut-sally, ihnp4!rice!beta!gamma!me}). Bang paths of 8 to 10 hops were
not uncommon. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long
transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both
transmission time and reliability, as messages would not infrequently
get lost. See {the network} and {sitename}.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {bang}{bounce message}{hop}{network address}{path}{the network}]