Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!samsung!usc!wuarchive!texbell!chinacat!telecom-gateway From: psrc@pegasus.att.com (Paul S. R. Chisholm) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: The Use and Abuse of UUNET (Was: ATTMAIL Access?) Message-ID: Date: 29 Nov 89 06:41:00 GMT Sender: news@chinacat.Lonestar.ORG Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 69 Approved: telecom-request@chinacat.lonestar.org X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 542, message 5 of 7 *sigh* Does anyone want to compile a list of "Frequently asked Telecom Digest questions"? In article , UCHUCK@unc.bitnet (Chuck Bennett 919-966-1134) writes: > I have an aquaintance who works at the Shreveport, LA AT&T location. > When we met (in person), he gave me the following email address: > "attmail!sp3ba!wcseal". As you can see, I am on BITNET. I also have > INTERNET access. Is there a way to get a message to him? First off, not all AT&T e-mail is AT&T Mail. Try wcseal@sp3ba.att.com; it may not work ("sp3ba" sounds like a 3B2, a small system, and may be in a subdomain), but it's the logical thing to try. Now for the recitation-of-the-month: AT&T Mail is a commercial e-mail service. There is *no* gateway between the AT&T Mail service and the Internet. It's not a technical problem (AT&T Mail talks uucp, and so do several gateways), but a billing question. Any system that acted as a gateway would be billed by AT&T Mail for all messages it passed on, and of course wouldn't have reliable way of passing the bills along to the systems it served; as a result, no one wants to be a gateway. (The same logic applies to Bitnet et al.) Yes, it would be nice if there was a gateway. Yes, there are gateways to MCI Mail and CompuServe. I know it. AT&T Mail management knows it. As of right now, there isn't one. This is going to sound silly, but . . . Every time I post a message along these lines, I get about half a dozen polite replies, saying, "Thank you very much for your informative article. I read it carefully, and with great interest. Can you tell me how I can get from the Internet to AT&T Mail?" You can't, okay? On 17 Nov 89 20:53:42 GMT, dmr@csli.stanford.edu (Daniel M. Rosenberg) said: > I'd expect you could bounce this off of uunet: e.g., attmail!wcseal@ > uunet.uu.net. (BTW, there is no !wcseal account on AT&T Mail.) In article , ckd%bu-pub.BU.EDU@ bu-it.bu.edu (Christopher K Davis) writes: > UUNET is a not-for-profit company that supplies forwarding service for > UUCP mail and news to their customers. As I've mentioned in several previous articles (including one recent one), if uunet forwarded messages to the AT&T Mail service, AT&T (which is a for-profit company) would bill uunet. uunet could bill *its* direct customers; but if they were passing traffic through from elsewhere, who could *they* bill? I've talked with Rick Adams (postmaster@uunet), and with AT&T Mail management, about this. Paul S. R. Chisholm, AT&T Bell Laboratories att!pegasus!psrc, psrc@pegasus.att.com, AT&T Mail !psrchisholm I'm not speaking for the company, I'm just speaking my mind. [Moderator's Note: Sorry, but I have to differ with you on the 'no gateway to attmail' statement. TELECOM Digest is sent to a few people who recieve it in their attmail boxes at their request. I send control copies of the Digest to my own attmail box from time to time to test the link. And what about inbound telex to attmail? Who pays for that? What about inbound to attmail from Telemail, or FAX? I think the main complaint of attmail managment was people who were inbound to them and using premium services outbound, like people who would write to !telex and leave attmail with no one at the gateway to bill. PT]