WANCHO@SIMTEL20.ARPA (11/20/86)
First of all, please address your requests to ARCHIVE-REQUEST@SIMTEL20.ARPA, *NOT* ARCHIVE-SERVER. That latter address is what appears as the Sender in the replies you receive. If you reply to that reply in the hopes of getting more files *and* your mail program is misimplemented in that it forms the header using the Sender: field, rather than the From:, your message will be bit-bucketted when it gets here. In fact, ALL mail addressed to ARCHIVE-SERVER, including mailer reject notices, is being discarded unseen by any human. Secondly, as of this past Saturday, we were forced to reduce the size of our host tables to improve Internet performance - the host tables share the same section of memory with the Internet free buffers. This rather drastic reduction was accomplished by removing all host aliases from the distributed table, along with all host entries which do not advertize at least one TCP service: FTP, TELNET, or SMTP. What this means is that if you are sending a message through an Internet host which is not using its Official Host Name, or does not advertize one of the TCP services listed above, do not expect to see a reply from us. Finally, I have noticed several messages coming to us from hosts which are not even listed in the original host tables we receive from NIC. These hosts are probably registered under a Domain. However, we do not have access to a domain lookup service at this time, and we don't have the resources to implement our own. If your request come to us from such a host, do not expect a reply either. One more thing: several weeks ago I patched our mailer to keep trying to send mail hourly for five days instead of three. This has helped somewhat in getting mail through to hosts which are taken down for a weekend or the long three-day weekends. It has even helped in getting replies back to the BITNET requestors via WISCVM, but not completely. I understand that work is in progress to try to reduce the volume of mailing list mail through that host in the hopes of increasing the chance for other mail to get through. What I have seen is that only parts of multi-part replies from the server getting through, requiring the requestor to re-request *all* parts of the file. There *may* be an extension made to the server, after the first of the year, to allow for selected parts to be sent. We are also waiting for some disk space to be freed up so that the latest releases of the PC-BLUE collection can be uploaded. We expect that to happen after the first of the year also. Meantime, patience. --Frank