fred@umcp-cs.UUCP (10/15/83)
This is probably going to start a lot of flaming, but here goes: There's a small company in the Washington D.C. area, whose only business is to forward mail to the U.S. Postal Service's E-COM system. They are one of the six (I think) companies which have an exclusive line to the Post Office's E-Com printing centers, and provide the service to local businesses at a markup. They are interested in expanding their market, and would like to provide the service to UseNet. This opens a whole can of worms, because if they just hang their system onto UseNet, and start accepting mail from customers at sites on the net, those intermediate systems which forward mail to them will (rightfully) object to forwarding mail which someone else will be making a profit off of. Some sort of advance permission from, and renumeration to, these intermediate sites is in order. The simplest solution would be to insist that anyone wishing to make use of the service connect to them directly. Also: there would be the problem of verification of the source of the mail for billing. Perhaps they could use some type of encryption. For the record: I'm not affiliated with this company in any way, but I'm posting this on their behalf since they're not on UseNet, and I'm interested in seeing this service provided in some form. How do people feel about this? Does anyone have any good ideas as to how to handle mail-forwarding & such? Should this discussion include other newsgroups? Fred Blonder harpo!seismo!umcp-cs!fred fred.umcp-cs@CSNet-Relay
mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (10/17/83)
Note that such a service would not be for Usenet, but rather for the UUCP net. As such, the "no money changes hands" policies of Usenet do not apply. The appropriate policies are those of UUCP. The policy of UUCP is "we forward your mail for free, and in return you forward our mail for free". Unless there are some serious objections, I would recommend that this policy be continued, that is, if site A needs to go through sites B and C to get to this service, they should be allowed to. However, in order to avoid overburdening any single gateway site (except, of course, for the service that is making money from this), I would recommend that all sites using the service should, if at all possible, set up a direct connection. Those who cannot set up a direct connection because they lack an autodialer or funds for the long distance calls should consider having this service poll them. Only in the case of (1) an impoverished institution, e.g. a university, or (2) a quick and temporary test case, should anyone go through a third site. If you must go through a third site, try to get their approval in advance, and consider reimbursing them for any costs they will incur. As to how to charge for the service, I suppose everybody will have to have an account number which is put into the headers of their messages - yet another RFC822 extension line. Lacking a good public key cryptosystem, I guess we'll just have to trust that people won't intercept the account numbers and start using them - I hope some applicible law covers this, since you can't make non-customers sign contracts agreeing not to use somebody elses number. Here's another wild thought - the traffic going to ECOM would probably be pretty low, right? How about some benevolent UUCP site that has some extra money and wants to generate goodwill picking up the tab? This would eliminate all this worry about account numbers. Hopefully nobody would abuse their goodwill by sending out mass mailings or large quantities of stuff. Mark Horton