jh@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (10/31/85)
I sent the message below to Sean Casey, in reply to his most recent
posting concerning the mailbounce issue. I forgot to Cc: it to
info-atari, and am doing so now, so that others can read it, as the
information contained therein is of general interest. Please note: I
am not anyone official here at MIT, but I have spoken with several
highly placed people here, all of whom gave me the same information,
which you see below. Some of it may sound drastic, but according to
these (very reliable) sources, this is the way things are. If you
have information to the contrary, please send me mail.
To those who requested the pmd program described in my last posting,
it still has some bugs in it, but I should be able to send it out
soon. Please be patient. At present it only has been tested on vaxen
running BSD 4.2 and 4.3 unix.
--jh--
Since you received and acknowledged my posting, I can only assume that
you didn't understand my main point. I'll restate:
The only individual you can possibly pin any blame on is Mark Crispin,
our old moderator, for not turning off the info-atari mailing list
when he ceased to be moderator.
This is because of the nature of arpa mailing lists. Auto-remail
programs work fine, until someone changes his mailing address without
telling anyone. This is why there is a moderator. This is in our
case the ONLY reason we have a moderator, since Mark never changed
anything posted to the list. Now he is gone, and the reason to have
moderators in the first place becomes evident: some mailing addresses
changed, and the list doesn't know about the changes. The result is
that the mail demons at the machines containing the now-nonexistent
addresses must return the mail to the sender, notifying him/her that
he had the wrong address. Furthermore, it must do so as soon as the
attempt to send is unsuccessful, and try again, because often software
or hardware is broken, and that, rather than bad addresses is why the
message went undelivered. They compromise at two retries, one per
day, which is why you get three mailbounce messages. If you complain
to anyone but the list (and by now it's getting REALLY boring, after
all it's our fault no more than yours), think what will happen:
If you send to the postmaster at score (your only serious choice), he
or she will kill the list unless he is AMAZINGLY tolerent and removes the
nonexistent addresses himself. He is required to fix the problem.
If you send to the postmaster at the machine(s) with the nonexistent
addresses, he or she will look for the source of the problem, find
that the problem is our lack of a moderator, and then send mail to the
postmaster at score (see above). I am surprised that the machines with
the nonexistent addresses have not already had us shut down, as we
bounce 10-15 messages each day from their machines.
If you send them to the nonexistent address, they bounce, each message
becomming three, each of which you send back, and you get nine
messages, then 27, 81,...,3^n. Where n is the number of days it takes
for the people at the poor, unsuspecting site to get mad. They,
after all, don't know what is going on, except that a lot of mail is
coming at them and going to an address that has been dead for a while,
that all of it was originally to info-atari, and that a geometrically
increasing amount is from you. They may not even have known that
info-atari exists before they received enough mail to cause problems
(believe me, for any normal arpa site, that's a LOT of mail -- we (MIT)
don't crash until we get 4000 messages simultaneously, and I doubt the
usenet can send at that speed. It sure would hurt your phone
bill, though). Their only recourse is: 1. Send mail to you asking you
to stop bombarding them with mail. 2. Send mail to your
postmaster telling him to stomp on you and the flagrant violation of
arpa rules (true, arpa has no jurisdiction, but it does have
priviledges they can revoke. See below). 3. If nothing changes
(doubtful, as your postmaster will still want arpa access), cut off
the uucp/arpa gateway. 4. To kill info-atari, which the postmaster at
score will do (indeed, is required to do) as soon as anyone complains
to him officially about any of the problems talked about, because
without a moderator we are basically "illegal" (groups such as this
are "illegal" even with moderators because they "waste" DoD resources,
(and wine-tasters' being blown away BY AN ACT OF CONGRESS WHICH SHOULD
HAVE KILLED ALL ARPA MAILING LISTS attests to this)).
That is the way things are, according to the local network
expert (professional employee of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, not a random hacker). If there is trouble, info-atari
goes away, and uucp/arpa access and your account are in grave danger
of a severe stomping-upon. If there is continued trouble, mailing
lists in general go away. Remember, arpa is a DoD construction, and,
as the backbone of the internet, what happens here affects a lot of
people. The sum spent on the net each year by the DoD is enormous,
and every year generals and other military people whose programs had
funding cut complain about the cost of supporting conversation between
college students and professors being unwarranted as part of a
military budget. We exist at their indulgence, and if we behave
badly, the damage in revoked priviledges will be enormous.
True, as a uucp node, you have a legitimate gripe. If the
problem becomes unbearable, please take the comparatively mild
solution of complaining to postmaster@score. Then anyone who REALLY
NEEDS this list is free to moderate it him- or herself.
--jh--
e-mail: post:
jh@mit-athena.MIT.EDU (preferred) Joe Harrington
jh%oz@mit-mc.MIT.EDU 69 Chestnut Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139