chris@gargoyle.UUCP (Chris Johnston) (07/08/86)
I get/receive attmail through ihnp4.
ks@svo.UUCP (07/08/86)
Well, it appears that just about every AT&T IS-owned machine is connected
with the 'attmail' service, as are several non-AT&T machines. You might
do well to look for 'attmail' in the UUCP map data.
But, one might ask "what's the cost"? Someone is footing the bill for
attmail, and I strongly suspect it is the connecting site. While this
might not really be a problem for AT&T sites (they *do* pay--albeit in-house--
for the services they use, by the way), commercial gateways to attmail
will have to pay for services used by foreign hosts.
I suppose one might class this under the Usenet philosophy of "carrying
one's own share of the network [financial] load." I know I do. But I'm
curious if anyone has a really strong aversion to gatewaying traffic to
attmail. (Traffic *from* attmail is "free" to the receiving site, though.)
I suppose one must use "sophisticated" mailers such as MMDF II to inhibit
this sort of flow.
Anyone want to take on this one?
Kurt F. Sauer
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Internet: <ks@a.cs.okstate.edu>
UUCP: <ks@svo.uucp>mikel@codas.UUCP (07/11/86)
> Well, it appears that just about every AT&T IS-owned machine is connected > with the 'attmail' service, as are several non-AT&T machines. You might > do well to look for 'attmail' in the UUCP map data. > > But, one might ask "what's the cost"? Someone is footing the bill for > attmail, and I strongly suspect it is the connecting site. While this > might not really be a problem for AT&T sites (they *do* pay--albeit in-house-- > for the services they use, by the way), commercial gateways to attmail > will have to pay for services used by foreign hosts. > > I suppose one might class this under the Usenet philosophy of "carrying > one's own share of the network [financial] load." I know I do. But I'm > curious if anyone has a really strong aversion to gatewaying traffic to > attmail. (Traffic *from* attmail is "free" to the receiving site, though.) > > I suppose one must use "sophisticated" mailers such as MMDF II to inhibit > this sort of flow. > > Kurt F. Sauer There is nothing stopping you from becomming a customer of AT&T Mail, and subscribing yourself. There are local access numbers nationally, and if you're not close to one, there are WATS (800) numbers. Why do you want another site to pay for uploading your mail? Suppose that you request to have something printed and sent via USNail, that will cost the uploading host an extra $2 per message. Worse yet, if you request to have it sent via 4 hour courier, it will cost the uploading site $17 for that message (or whatever the cost is, but it's high). I know someone is going to bring up the subject of other hosts paying the phone bill when you send mail via them. In my personal opinion, this is justified by them having the capability to do the same via your site (ie: sharing). If you want to look at it this way, why don't you register yourself with AT&T Mail, pay the bills you get, and "share" your access to the service with other sites that will let you "share". Disclaimer: I am in no way involved with AT&T Mail, other than being a user and an employee of AT&T, which may not share my opinions. I _p_e_r_s_o_n_a_l_l_y don't like the idea of another site charging for uucp access. -- ___ / \ Mikel Manitius @ AT&T-IS Altamonte Springs, FL | RPI | ...{seismo!akgua|ihnp4|cbosgd|mcnc}!codas!mikel | . | \\-------//
gjm@packard.UUCP (07/14/86)
In article <514@gargoyle.UUCP> chris@gargoyle.UUCP (Chris Johnston) writes: > >I get/receive attmail through ihnp4. Since AT&T MAIL charges for message delivery, the ihnp4 attmail link was intended for friendly use (and not for public knowledge). However ihnp4 has not paid its $814 AT&T MAIL bill (my request for payment by my previous management seems to have been rejected). The ihnp4 --> attmail link seems to have been cut (attmail rejects ihnp4's login attempts, but I haven't checked attmail --> ihnp4). The latest bill shows that there was no activity for the past month. So any mail destined for attmail through ihnp4 will be returned to sender after 7 days of failed attempts at delivery. The ironic part of the charges is that ihnp4 has delivered much more than $814 worth of messages and sources for the AT&T MAIL developers, but since it is "friendly" and doesn't charge for delivery, we cant offset the charges (even on request to waive the bill). Alas, the days of free delivery seem numbered, and I am no longer in a position to promote or prolong the golden days of free, fast, and friendly service. Start adjusting your thinking for the future: good service requires good payment Please be prepared to pay for your own private link to attmail. -Gary
simon@einode.UUCP (07/16/86)
> Disclaimer: I am in no way involved with AT&T Mail, other than being > a user and an employee of AT&T, which may not share my > opinions. I personally don't like the idea of another > site charging for uucp access. > -- > ___ > / \ Mikel Manitius @ AT&T-IS Altamonte Springs, FL > | RPI | ...{seismo!akgua|ihnp4|cbosgd|mcnc}!codas!mikel > | . | > \\-------// you obviusly don't live in EUROPE. we pay for all mail to the US and FROM the US -- -- Simon Kenyon The National Software Centre, Dublin, IRELAND +353-1-716255 simon@einode.UUCP
mikel@codas.UUCP (07/19/86)
>>I personally don't like the idea of another site charging for uucp access. >> >> Mikel Manitius > > you obviusly don't live in EUROPE. No, but I did for many years (8 to be exact). > we pay for all mail to the US and FROM the US > > Simon Kenyon If you're paying for long distance data lines, and/or communications costs, that's one thing, but if another site is charging you for access to them, then that is what I disagree with. -- Mikel Manitius @ AT&T-IS Altamonte Springs, FL ...{seismo!akgua|ihnp4|cbosgd|mcnc}!codas!mikel -- Mikel Manitius @ AT&T-IS Altamonte Springs, FL ...{seismo!akgua|ihnp4|cbosgd|mcnc}!codas!mikel
kre@munnari.UUCP (07/20/86)
In article <657@codas.ATT.UUCP>, mikel@codas.ATT.UUCP (Mikel Manitius) writes: > If you're paying for long distance data lines, and/or communications > costs, that's one thing, but if another site is charging you for access > to them, then that is what I disagree with. You can disagree all you like, but you're not going to change anything. Australian, and European, sites have to suffer one very expensive hop to get mail to & from the US. Expecting one site to pay the communication charges for that would be ludicrous. At munnari (ie: here) we charge all Australian sites the cost of sending and receiving mail to and from the US (we don't make a profit, we just recover our costs). Anyone who "disagrees" with this policy just doesn't get to send or receive any mail. For some surprising reason, no-one has disagreed yet... Robert Elz seismo!munnari!kre kre%munnari.oz@seismo.css.gov
edg@micropro.UUCP (Ed Greenberg) (07/21/86)
In article <657@codas.ATT.UUCP> mikel@codas.ATT.UUCP (Mikel Manitius) writes: >If you're paying for long distance data lines, and/or communications >costs, that's one thing, but if another site is charging you for access >to them, then that is what I disagree with. >-- > Mikel Manitius @ AT&T-IS Altamonte Springs, FL Oh, come on now! ATTMAIL isn't a "SITE" It's a for-profit electronic mail carrier. It happens that a feature of such a service is to pick up and deliver mail to Un*x machines running uucp and mail. Wunnderful! If I send mail to ATTMAIL, they're going to charge me a buck or so to pass it on, right? So, is it all so unreasonable to say to the net, "NO! YOU CAN'T RUN UP MY ATTMAIL BILL. I WON'T PAY FOR YOUR TRAFFIC IN REAL HARD DOLLARS CHARGED TO MY COST CENTER." One of the reasons that MicroPro probably will not connect to ATTMAIL is that we have no way of keeping somebody from mailing to micropro!attmail and thus foisting their mail charges off on us. Would a gentlemens agreement work? Probably, but only among the gentlemen. Does anybody out there have a method for a site without a source license to pass mail between all it's neighbors EXCEPT attmail? We run honey-dan-ber so we have the source for that, but others (SCO? MicroPort? etc.) won't even have that. This is going to be quite an issue, isn't it. -edg
mikel@codas.ATT.UUCP (Mikel Manitius) (07/23/86)
>>If you're paying for long distance data lines, and/or communications >>costs, that's one thing, but if another site is charging you for access >>to them, then that is what I disagree with. >> >> Mikel Manitius @ AT&T-IS Altamonte Springs, FL > > Oh, come on now! ATTMAIL isn't a "SITE" It's a for-profit electronic > mail carrier. It happens that a feature of such a service is to pick up > and deliver mail to Un*x machines running uucp and mail. Wunnderful! Incorrect. In all practical purposes, "attmail" is a uucp site. It is different in the sense that it can be dialed locally in most major cities, or via an 800 (wats) number, has a massive user base, and offers other services (ie: USNail, express courier, Telex), however it is still just one node to UUCP, no matter where you are. > "NO! YOU CAN'T RUN UP MY ATTMAIL BILL. I WON'T PAY FOR YOUR TRAFFIC IN > REAL HARD DOLLARS CHARGED TO MY COST CENTER." It is a bit silly, but it may be harder to justify a large attmail bill than the usual phone bill to the bean counters. Also, as I stated earlier, you can run up quite a large bill if you use all of the AT&T Mail services. > One of the reasons that MicroPro probably will not connect to ATTMAIL is > that we have no way of keeping somebody from mailing to > micropro!attmail and thus foisting their mail charges off on us. Well, that just like "NO! YOU CAN'T RUN UP MY ATTMAIL BILL". Whether you connect or not, is of course your choice, but if you don't for the reason that you can't control others from sending mail through you because you don't want to pay for them, then don't expect to foister your charges on them. > Does anybody out there have a method for a site without a source license > to pass mail between all it's neighbors EXCEPT attmail? We run > honey-dan-ber so we have the source for that, but others (SCO? > MicroPort? etc.) won't even have that. HoneyDanBer (or any other UUCP) wouldn't be a good place to put in a restriction. A configurable mail would, but not everyone can have the luxury of that. However you could take "smail" (Public Domain), put the restrictions in there, and make it a front-end to your local mail system. (Smail will also give you pathalias data capability) > This is going to be quite an issue, isn't it. > -edg Probably so, but I think the main problem is that AT&T Mail may not be understood fully by everyone, it is a system of which the distributed architecture is intended to be transparent to the user. I would suggest that anyone interrested cat AT&T Mail, and ask for more information. A brochure will not cost you anything, but will clear up lots of questions. The Assitance/Registration Number is (800) MAIL-672 (6245) -- Mikel Manitius @ AT&T-IS Altamonte Springs, FL ...{seismo!akgua|ihnp4|cbosgd|mcnc}!codas!mikel
joel@gould9.UUCP (Joel West) (07/23/86)
In article <288@micropro.UUCP>, edg@micropro.UUCP (Ed Greenberg) writes: > Oh, come on now! ATTMAIL isn't a "SITE" It's a for-profit electronic > mail carrier. It happens that a feature of such a service is to pick up > and deliver mail to Un*x machines running uucp and mail. Wunnderful! > > If I send mail to ATTMAIL, they're going to charge me a buck or so to > pass it on, right? So, is it all so unreasonable to say to the net, > "NO! YOU CAN'T RUN UP MY ATTMAIL BILL. I WON'T PAY FOR YOUR TRAFFIC IN > REAL HARD DOLLARS CHARGED TO MY COST CENTER." Personally, as far as I'm concerned, no UUCP site should accept mail from "attmail" unless it is allowed to return mail through "attmail" for free. A site that expects others to take its mail for free but charges the same site for replies is a parasite, plain and simple. The fact that it is a for-profit parasite makes it worse. This issue won't be going away. Unless attmail finds some gullible fool, or cuts a deal like this with one or more sites, I suspect their connectivity on the net is going to gradually decrease to nothingness. -- Joel West (619) 457-9681 CACI, Inc. Federal, 3344 N. Torrey Pines Ct., La Jolla, CA 92037 {cbosgd, ihnp4, pyramid, sdcsvax, ucla-cs} !gould9!joel joel%gould9.uucp@NOSC.ARPA
dyer@spdcc.UUCP (Steve Dyer) (07/24/86)
>Personally, as far as I'm concerned, no UUCP site should accept mail >from "attmail" unless it is allowed to return mail through "attmail" >for free. A site that expects others to take its mail for free but >charges the same site for replies is a parasite, plain and simple. >The fact that it is a for-profit parasite makes it worse. This discussion is getting more and more bizarre by the minute. Do people read any more, or do they simply prefer to flame without using their brains? "AT&T Mail" offers UUCP transmission for electronic messages between subscribing hosts. Usually, this is implemented as a one-hop: attmail!subscribinghost!user. If anything, this is a convenience for hosts with UUCP access, so users can avoid having to dialup their mailboxes, as is necessary for MCI Mail, Compuserve, EasyLink, and other EMail services. Now, I suppose that one *could* put an arbitrary UUCP path after the subscriber host, but remember that AT&T Mail didn't place it there, the orignator of the message did. There is clearly a need to be able to limit the ability of other sites to freely use one's site as an AT&T mail gateway, but that is really a different issue from my response to this series of flames. BTW, any site which would accept mail from "attmail" would be an AT&T Mail subscriber. They won't call you, and you can't call them, if you're not. AT&T Mail isn't a competitor to, or even a participant in, the USENET/UUCP world. Unfortunately, it can use the same transport mechanism and addressing scheme (UUCP), and that brings an expected overlap with some of its customers. >This issue won't be going away. Unless attmail finds some gullible >fool, or cuts a deal like this with one or more sites, I suspect >their connectivity on the net is going to gradually decrease to >nothingness. Hon, "AT&T Mail" doesn't seek any connectivity on the "net". In fact, as far as this issue goes, it's a fair bet that they'd be relieved if the informal UUCP world didn't exist at all. -- Steve Dyer dyer@harvard.HARVARD.EDU {linus,wanginst,bbncca,bbnccv,harvard,ima,ihnp4}!spdcc!dyer
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (07/24/86)
I'd like to remind folks that the 80 cent charge for sending a message through AT&T Mail includes both the phone call to send it to AT&T Mail, and the phone call for AT&T Mail to call the system on the other end. That is, you can call the 800 number to send it to them (or a local number if you have one in your city) and they will pay for the call to deliver it to the next hop. This is for 24 hour/day service, no waiting for someone to poll you, no waiting until the rates are cheap. When you consider how long it takes to get logged in, transfer a message, and get logged out, you're probably looking at a 3 minute phone call. And don't forget how many UUCP calls fail, because the login has changed, the line was too noisy, or something else is messed up, causing you to call every hour, time out for several minutes, and give up - this costs for the phone call, and ties up your dialer. You can expect AT&T mail to keep their system running at all times, and even if it goes down, the phone call is free. Then note that if AT&T mail catches on, it only takes two hops to get to your destination - one to the ATTMAIL hub, and one to the destination. This saves a lot from the long UUCP paths that are otherwise used. Finally, note that if your message is short (headers are free, only the body counts) it's only 40 cents, not 80. (If it's long, it goes up over 80 cents, in some units.) I don't have hard data to support it (if anyone does, please let me know) but it seems to me that sending email through AT&T Mail is probably less expensive than via regular phone links. Assuming you can convince your bean counters that a bill to AT&T Mail is the same sort of overhead that your phone bill is, there is no reason to treat an AT&T Mail UUCP link differently than any other UUCP link for which you pay a phone bill. Mark
mikel@codas.ATT.UUCP (Mikel Manitius) (07/25/86)
>>Personally, as far as I'm concerned, no UUCP site should accept mail >>from "attmail" unless it is allowed to return mail through "attmail" >>for free. A site that expects others to take its mail for free but >>charges the same site for replies is a parasite, plain and simple. >>The fact that it is a for-profit parasite makes it worse. I agree. > This discussion is getting more and more bizarre by the minute. Do people > read any more, or do they simply prefer to flame without using their brains? > "AT&T Mail" offers UUCP transmission for electronic messages between > subscribing hosts. Usually, this is implemented as a one-hop: > attmail!subscribinghost!user. If anything, this is a convenience for hosts > with UUCP access, so users can avoid having to dialup their mailboxes, > as is necessary for MCI Mail, Compuserve, EasyLink, and other EMail services. > *could* put an arbitrary UUCP path after the subscriber host, but remember Don't *YOU* read anymore? The majority of AT&T Mail's trafic comes from online users. Yes, users that login to AT&T Mail and run a mail service user interface to read and generate their mail. UUCP is just a small part of AT&T Mail. There is also a package that will allow your AT&T Pc6300 (or clone) to communicate with, and download mail from, AT&T Mail. As the manual describes it, the reason UUCP links exist, is so that a site with a large concentration of users does not have to register all of the users with individual accounts on AT&T Mail. The manual also states that you may wish to take precautions so that other sites do not submit jobs via your machine, which would dirrectly cost your account. However these links do exist, and will probably always exist as long as there are UUCP connections to AT&T Mail. My argument not against these links, it is simply that if you want to take advantage of the services offered by AT&T Mail you should be paying form them yourself, and not submitting jobs through other sites. Regardless whether you like the idea AT&T Mail charing or not. I have an account on AT&T Mail (!mmanitius), and all mail that arrives there will be forwarded to me at mikel@codas. Yes, "codas" is registerd. And while I may not mind seeing a once-in-a-while message bounce though (ie: out of despiration), I will complain to unauthorized abusers, which I beleive ought to have their own link. > Hon, "AT&T Mail" doesn't seek any connectivity on the "net". In fact, > as far as this issue goes, it's a fair bet that they'd be relieved if > the informal UUCP world didn't exist at all. Since when did you become a spokesperson for AT&T Mail? (Disclamier: I am not a spokesperson of any sort, I am siply stating the facts as I happen to see them to be correct. However I do not make statements and assumptions about the intentions of the managment of AT&T Mail) -- Mikel Manitius @ AT&T-IS Altamonte Springs, FL ...{seismo!akgua|ihnp4|cbosgd|mcnc}!codas!mikel
sob@soma.UUCP (Stan Barber) (07/25/86)
To intercept mail bound for sites like AT&T mail requires a mailer with
some intelligence on the host that want to make the restriction. Sendmail
could do it, and I am sure modifications to rmail itself (for those
sites running uumail or the soon coming smail) could so that as well.
--
Stan uucp:{shell,rice,drillsys}!soma!sob Opinions expressed here
Olan domain:sob@rice.edu or sob@soma.bcm.tmc.edu are ONLY mine &
Barber CIS:71565,623 BBS:(713)660-9252 noone else's.bam@sdchem.UUCP (Bret Marquis) (07/27/86)
I've been using attmail for a few months now as a commercial paying customer. Its greatest benefit is for uucp messages that *must* get through, it is nice to have in reserve. For day to day messaging, the service is just too expensive. Those 40 and 80 cent multipliers add up very quickly. Bret Marquis