webber@athos.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) (06/14/88)
In article <585@cbnews.ATT.COM>, mark@cbnews.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) writes: > Mail into and out of AT&T through the "att" > gateway will continue. "att" is serving as a professionally run > replacement for ihnp4 and cbosgd. Would it be accurate to say that att now views itself as a very big leaf node? It will be interesting to see how the net deals with a leaf that generates as much traffic as att. > There is, in fact, a major reshaping of the email world in the works. > The current system is cooperative - people worry about delivering mail > first, and getting it paid for isn't a concern. ... > With X.400 beginning to be offered, commercial mail services are springing > up. These include ATTMAIL, Canada's Envoy, Britain's BTI, and so on. > There are others, not all are X.400: MCIMAIL, Easylink, Dialnet, etc. > (There are also services like UUNET which charge by connect time, and > which are nonprofit. They don't seem to count.) > > These services all charge the *sender* (except for COD mail) for each > message, and in general worry more about getting paid than about delivering > the message. So they won't pass a message unless they know who to bill. > ... > Comments? It is amusing to watch someone explain how the great hand of history is forcing them to shift the costs of the net on to others. As near as I can tell, all this talk about commercial email systems is rather silly as the only reason for them is because many people have not yet bought their own computer gear. How long do you think it will be before answering machines will talk Bell 212 and convert to speech on playback. Why would anyone want to bother with a commerical email carrier when they can just place the call themself? The reason for the existance of the net is that knowledgable people can cooperatively run a service alot more efficiently than a company that has to deal with alot of novice connections. This will always stay true. At the moment, the net has attempted to reach out to alot of unknowledgable users, just as unix has mistakenly been installed in alot of non-research environments. It is to be expected (and hoped) that we will eventually lose some of these fringe users to commercial houses that can better administer to their needs, but that should not be mistaken for the death of Usenet any more than the mouse was the death of the keyboard. ------ BOB (webber@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!athos.rutgers.edu!webber) p.s., anyone want to start a pool on whether it will be cheaper to use your acoustic modem on a voice grade connection or to pay for a digital connection once ISDN sets up?