mp (05/31/82)
Erik Fair's explanation is almost correct. Berkeley stopped transmitting netnews over the Arpanet, and somehow people interpreted this as meaning "Berkeley is not forwarding any mail to the Arpanet." A separate issue was that some WorkS subscribers who were high Arpa muckymucks were complaining about the lack of "To" fields in messages. Contrary to what Erik said, the messages DID conform to the RFC733 standard, it's just that people prefer "To" fields (if you're on about 20 lists like I am, you begin to get irritated when a message contains no "To" field). That standard, by the way, is finally being revised by Dave Crocker at UDel. The bottom line, I'm told, is that there's "no problem" if the digest is moderated and if the moderator is situated on a uucpnet/Arpanet boundary so that no submission to the moderator has to traverse part of a taboo net. Some digests are already being distributed this way, some are not. The phrase "no problem" isn't really accurate, because Arpa still hasn't sanctioned most of these mailing lists in the first place, and they certainly haven't sanctioned any uucp/Arpa gateways. Berkeley is perfectly free to turn off the gateway anytime they choose (or are told to). I asked the Arpanet digest moderators to clarify what was going on, and apparently every major list is being fed into USENET again, through various gateways. Telecom, human-nets, and sf-lovers were suspended because Berkeley's C70 (the Arpanet machine) got a filled disk or something last week and the mailer began sending errors back to the digest moderators; I'm told that the service has since been restored. Additional information may be gotten by talking to unc!brl-bmd!jsol. Mark Plotnick, MIT