night@pawl.rpi.edu (Trip Martin) (12/07/90)
Apologies if this has been discussed before, but is it possible to send mail between the internet (or bitnet) and prodigy? If so, how is it done? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. -- -- Trip Martin night@pawl.rpi.edu -- -- Trip Martin night@pawl.rpi.edu
johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us (John R. Levine) (12/07/90)
In article <K%B^D-%@rpi.edu> you write: >Apologies if this has been discussed before, but is it possible >to send mail between the internet (or bitnet) and prodigy? Fat chance. If you've been following the discussion in the Telecom digest and elsewhere, Prodigy thinks that they're doing their users a big favor by letting them send mail to each other at all, much less allowing a gateway to other systems. Prodigy was designed to be a one-to-many system, that is, users call up regional concentrators which communicate with the main system. Users are supposed to spend their time looking at catalogs and stuff like that, fixed shared screens which the regional concentrators can cache. Since mail is private, and they don't even know that all copies of a message addressed to a mailing list are the same, each time you look at a mail message the regional machine has to make a request to the main system, which loads the regional-main links more heavily than they'd expected. This problem is exacerbated by their practice of delaying and censoring messages to the public bulletin boards, which caused users to create mailing lists for their semi-private conversations. Rather than fix their system design, either by creating semi-public bulletin boards or by creating a more efficient mail system, they have started charging for mail messages. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us, {spdcc|ima|world}!iecc!johnl