Article-I.D.: brl-adm.961
Posted: Thu Nov 20 00:24:49 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 20-Nov-86 02:38:41 EST
Sender: news@brl-adm.ARPA
Lines: 47

First of all, please address your requests to
ARCHIVE-REQUEST@SIMTEL20.ARPA, *NOT* ARCHIVE-SERVER.  That latter
address is what appears as the Sender in the replies you receive.  If
you reply to that reply in the hopes of getting more files *and* your
mail program is misimplemented in that it forms the header using the
Sender: field, rather than the From:, your message will be
bit-bucketted when it gets here.  In fact, ALL mail addressed to
ARCHIVE-SERVER, including mailer reject notices, is being discarded
unseen by any human.

Secondly, as of this past Saturday, we were forced to reduce the size
of our host tables to improve Internet performance - the host tables
share the same section of memory with the Internet free buffers.  This
rather drastic reduction was accomplished by removing all host aliases
from the distributed table, along with all host entries which do not
advertize at least one TCP service: FTP, TELNET, or SMTP.

What this means is that if you are sending a message through an
Internet host which is not using its Official Host Name, or does not
advertize one of the TCP services listed above, do not expect to see a
reply from us.

Finally, I have noticed several messages coming to us from hosts which
are not even listed in the original host tables we receive from NIC.
These hosts are probably registered under a Domain.  However, we do
not have access to a domain lookup service at this time, and we don't
have the resources to implement our own.  If your request come to us
from such a host, do not expect a reply either.

One more thing: several weeks ago I patched our mailer to keep trying
to send mail hourly for five days instead of three.  This has helped
somewhat in getting mail through to hosts which are taken down for a
weekend or the long three-day weekends.  It has even helped in getting
replies back to the BITNET requestors via WISCVM, but not completely.
I understand that work is in progress to try to reduce the volume of
mailing list mail through that host in the hopes of increasing the
chance for other mail to get through.  What I have seen is that only
parts of multi-part replies from the server getting through, requiring
the requestor to re-request *all* parts of the file.  There *may* be
an extension made to the server, after the first of the year, to allow
for selected parts to be sent.

We are also waiting for some disk space to be freed up so that the
latest releases of the PC-BLUE collection can be uploaded.  We expect
that to happen after the first of the year also.  Meantime, patience.

--Frank