Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!mcdchg!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp
Subject: Re: Domain Registration (was Re: Imminent death of UUCP Zone predicted)
Message-ID: <1990Aug09.185558.15145@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 9 Aug 90 18:55:58 GMT
References: <961@van-bc.wimsey.bc.ca> <1990Jul26.025310.4158@chinet.ch <2118@cirrusl.UUCP>
Organization: Chinet - Public Access UNIX
Lines: 29

In article <2118@cirrusl.UUCP> dhesi%cirrusl@oliveb.ATC.olivetti.com (Rahul Dhesi) writes:

>I think that asking anybody who already has a computer and a modem to
>invest more money in a new machine for email is not a good idea.  We
>need a dial-up email standard that anybody who already has PC and modem
>can use by simply loading some software.

Yes, you can use a refigerator as a paperweight but not everyone likes
to do it just because the referigerator was expensive.  There already
is a dial-up email standard in the form of uucp mail, and there is
software available to emulate it on a variety of machines.  There are
also several reasons why it it not widely used.

>It's good if the fax machine makers become compatible with this
>standard; it's not good for this standard to be incompatible with
>existing PCs and modems.

There have to be orders of magnitudes more fax machines around than
PC's that are continuously available for email reception, so I would
make this argument the other way around.  Anyway, all you need is a
forwarding machine to gateway between a new optimal method and existing
equipment.  If you don't have enough traffic to justify a gateway,
well, then it doen't matter much anyway - you might as well just have
an account with mcimail, attmail, CIS, or the like.  Attmail (and
probably some of the others) provides PC software to hide the details
of the connection.

 Les Mikesell
  les@chinet.chi.il.us