tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) (04/09/91)
I am going to attempt a rarity: to have the last word on this subject. :-) Usenet itself refers to news, not mail. There are many Usenet sites which are mail-reachable using the address information provided in their news articles. That subset is mostly comprised of well behaved Internet, BITNET and UUCP sites which happen to use the same namespace for news and mail traffic. It does not include the many mailable sites which don't happen to carry Netnews; it does not include the variety of places which exchange Netnews but either do not support mail or use a completely different gateway for it. You can choose to call mail to this limited set of sites "Usenet mail" if you want. But the concept is USELESS, since it is inadequate for proper mail administration and misleading in its implication that mail to a news site will actually work in the general case. If what we really want is a name for mail to all the possible places you can reach these days, then we can discuss this (although not in news.admin, since it's not a news issue). People who think they can wave their hands and either call it Usenet mail (when it sure the hell ain't Usenet) or just say "well YOU know what I mean!" are missing the point entirely. In general we do NOT know what they mean, *if* they mean the total universe of mailability as described above. All the easy cases, e.g. Internet mail or UUCP mail, already have names. Beyond this, there are gateways of every conceivable description being built out there! If mail somehow makes it, you're on the net. What net? Who the hell knows. So, how about just The Net as the name for everything you can mail to. Realize that "The Net" is not the same today as it was yesterday, nor will it be the same tomorrow. "The Net" means the worldwide entity by default; you could refer to some piece of it as "the Brazilian Net" or "the Net at Smegma State U" or whatever.