Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!killer!vector!rpp386!pigs!haugj
From: haugj@pigs.UUCP (Joe Bob Willie)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Cut off AT&T? (Was: The death of USENET)
Summary: AT&T still not holding up its end of the deal.
Message-ID: <192@pigs.UUCP>
Date: 27 Jun 88 21:07:27 GMT
References: <2761@ttrdc.UUCP> <32.UUL1.3#935@aocgl.UUCP>
Organization: Big "D" Oil and Gas
Lines: 57

In article <32.UUL1.3#935@aocgl.UUCP>, tmanos@aocgl.UUCP (Theodore W. Manos) writes:
> In article <2761@ttrdc.UUCP> levy@ttrdc.UUCP (Daniel R. Levy) writes:
> > The ONLY THING that AT&T is planning to stop carrying, as best as I have heard
> > (there has been traffic on internal AT&T groups about this too) is MAIL
> > BETWEEN TWO NON-AT&T SITES.  NETNEWS WILL CONTINUE TO BE CARRIED.  The
> > analogous thing for the net to do would be to decline to carry AT&T's
> > mail BETWEEN TWO AT&T SITES.  (AT&T doesn't, and shouldn't, generate
> > site-to-site mail with such routings anyhow.)  So think about it a while
> > before you get sore and start planning "revenge."
> 
> And there, I *did* mean *any* e-mail pass-through.  A lot of effect it
> would have on AT&T to stop passing through e-mail only between two AT&T
> sites! :^)  If AT&T won't pass our mail (unless it is of some benefit to
> them to do so), give me a good reason why we (meaning non-AT&T sites)
> should continue to pass their mail (unless it is of some benefit to us).

at&t continuing to carry netnews only adds insult to injury.  sure, they
can take what they want and leave the rest of the burden of supporting the
net to someone else.

what at&t has done is the same as if every company on the net refused to
talk any other company, or, maximally, no more than one other company.
each user would then have subscribe to some public common data carrier,
such as at&t-mail for mail service, with each of the public common data
carriers having their own means of sending message between each other.

an additional question which remains unanswered is will at&t handle
third party mail for their usenet neighbors?  if at&t has any non-at&t
neighbors, and it must have at least one, then it is possible that dumb
mailers which use the newspath: are going to generate mailpaths which
include the at&t site in the path.  if at&t does not have more than one
non-at&t site, WHO IS GOING TO BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO GATEWAY ALL OF AT&T?

while a full feed into .att.com is going to be no greater than a
full feed into any other site, what site is going to be willing to
feed all of the mail replies which at&t sites are going to generate
back to .att.com?

the best possible course of action for at&t to take would be to drop
all small connections.  for example, how many of us have uucp logins
with ihnp4 (or had) and aren't large computer manufacturers?  the
mistake seems to be at&t allowing too many irresponsible sites to
directly connect, in a recursive fashion, to their machines.  one
possible alternative is to decrease machine load by penalizing links
which talk to systems which are actually using ihnp4 as a smart-host.
or, simpler still, stop running a smart mailer on ihnp4.

at&t has thrown the baby out with the bath water and needs to do
something before the poor brat hits the concrete with a resounding
thud.

- john.
-- 
 The Beach Bum                                 Big "D" Home for Wayward Hackers
 UUCP: ...!killer!rpp386!jfh                          jfh@rpp386.uucp :SMAILERS

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