lhl@parmesan.wisc.edu (L.H. Landweber) (08/07/87)
On December 1, WISCVM will be shut down. Hence, as of that date, we will no longer be able to provide a mail relay service between Arpanet and BITNET. WISCVM currently handles between 5 and 10 thousand messages per day. Clearly, this service is very important to the academic/research network community. As such it should be fully supported. Many of you may not be aware that at present the WISCVM relay is only supported by a volunteer student (indeed, this summer he has a full-time job off campus). Because of the (admittedly) inadequate level of support, problems arise periodically. For example, for the past day most messages have been rejected. The current problem occurred because there was some ambiguity in our instructions for installing new host tables. We would be happy to provide advice on what is required to run a supported mail relay. Besides operations and bug fixing, such support should include consulting for system administrators (if not for users). Hopefully, some suitable organization will be found to provide this service. Larry Landweber