werner@utastro.UUCP (Werner Uhrig) (06/16/88)
You do not deserve all the bad press you are getting lately, result of having the decency of announcing the final "reduction" of services by those 2 heroic machines. I am glad that none of the old-timers seem to have gotten the matter confused, as all of them should know that ihnp4 and cbosgd had been downgraded over the years slowly but consistently in the services they provided to the general public, but in olden times, mailing to ihnp4 and have it find the intended recipient's host was once considered wizard's knowledge which separated the men from the boys. (nobody knew anything about women (and their problems) on the net, then ... :-) As far as I am concerned, all these people we've been hearing from lately, foaming at the mouth and barfing up venom and gibberish, probably have rabies and should be quarantined from the net for a while, so that they have the time and reason to FIRST learn something about the facts before they SECOND accuse, condemn, and lynch anyone or anything - or ruin the day of one of our friends at AT&T. AT&T and any other company which has expensive in-house long-distance networks have every reason to protect themselves from others routing their mail through their internal network, just to have it emerge somewhere again to be delivered to someone outside the company. This is true especially for a company that is trying to make a living by selling long-distance services. If AT&T has in the past allowed themselves to be open to having people communicate long-distance at the cost of a local phone-call, we owe them a "thanks" - even if it is the case that AT&T simply was "too lazy" to invest the effort to plug the hole sooner... (-: as a parting thought, what has IBM, HP, DEC, MCI, .... done for you lately? they (and many other companies) could also pay for your long-distance call ...
mike@ists (Mike Clarkson) (06/19/88)
Why doesn't AT&T just publish artificially high costs in the maps for their sites? Most mailers on Usenet that originate high volumes of mail use pathalias, and this would drop their traffic a lot. Their mail could still move in and out, and most other mail would move around it. Seems silly to start patching smail to accomodate a one way flow. All they would have to do is make sure the Usenet machines they talk to do automatic rerouting (which I abhore based) on the high-cost paths database. -- Mike Clarkson mike@ists.UUCP Institute for Space and Terrestrial Science mike@ists.yorku.ca York University, North York, Ontario, uunet!mnetor!yunexus!ists!mike CANADA M3J 1P3 +1 (416) 736-5611