karn@allegra.UUCP (Phil Karn) (03/24/84)
Recently, the mail forwarding load on allegra has gotten out of hand. People are mailing 180K byte files, 20 person mailing lists and the like through allegra (and multiple other sites as well) to sites all over the continent. Gateways such as allegra are provided as a courtesy service for occasional, light use ONLY. Should there be a need for large or regular mail traffic between two sites, common courtesy dictates the establishment of direct uucp connections, which are also much faster and more reliable. The telephone company does an excellent job of routing connections between any arbitrary pair of telephone numbers; therefore there is little excuse for not having an almost fully interconnected network. We don't want to follow the practice of some other sites and disallow mail forwarding; this only seems to result in increased use of netnews for personal messages of the type "so-and-so ##*@! system won't forward mail, so I'm posting my reply here." On the other hand, allegra simply cannot continue to carry the amount of traffic it has been seeing recently. Its puny dialers are perpetually busy, and the machine's load average is often 7 or 8 even at 3 in the morning. Therefore, we are strongly urging all mail users, particularly those who moderate mailing lists, to establish direct links to their destination sites. Use allegra if you wish to exchange uucp coordination messages with other sites, but please don't abuse it. Thank you. John Linderman (allegra!jpl) Phil Karn (allegra!karn)