sibley (01/25/83)
It has been (again) suggested that readers use mail more, and submit fewer essentially identical remarks to the net. I agree with this, but there are problems. Unfortunately, the "From:" field of an article need not be a valid mail path. There are sites that forward news but not mail. In some cases, this operates so that there are sites on the net that cannot be mailed to at all, even though they send and receive news. For example, I don't know how to get mail from here to seismo -- the only connections I know of involve news links through harpo, which does not (or at least for a while did not) forward mail. Also there used to be one-way news links. I don't know how these handled mail, or whether they still exist. Finally, it seems that some sites don't notify you if your mail is not delivered, so you never know whether your message got there. Having being burned by this problem a few times, I'm reluctant to use remote mail to strange sites at all. Dave Sibley Department of Mathematics Penn State University psuvax!sibley