Path: utzoo!utstat!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!daver!vsi1!lmb
From: lmb@vicom.com (Larry Blair)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Who pays the bill?
Message-ID: <1990Aug6.220005.11200@vicom.com>
Date: 6 Aug 90 22:00:05 GMT
References: <1990Aug02.203405.40@looking.on.ca> <29103@becker.UUCP> <1990Aug04.171540.29439@looking.on.ca> <15727@bfmny0.BFM.COM>
Organization: Vicom Systems Inc., Fremont, CA
Lines: 33

In article <15727@bfmny0.BFM.COM> tneff@bfmny0.BFM.COM (Tom Neff) writes:

=New people and sites are coming online all the time, and aside from the
=usual growing pains and cross-cultural issues (like the BBS-itis I
=occasionally rail against) it's all fitting together reasonably well.
=
=There are complaints, but that's a feature, not a bug.  Some people HAVE
=to complain -- and the net's there for them, too.

I find it interesting that, despite the anarchy, the things that are really
broken DO get fixed eventually.  A good example was the initial release of
nn, which produced bogus Re^n: lines.  Although you still see these things
occasionally, they are not much of a problem nowadays.

I think that the same thing has happened with Path: replies.  Yes, they still
exist.  The problem, though, has dropped by an order of magnitude.  We pass
a reasonable amount of news (I think that we were #72 on Brian's last posting)
but we have few downstream sites that don't have a better path to the Internet.
A couple of years ago, at least 50% of the mail transitting through here was
obviously reverse-path generated.  Looking at it now, the amount has fallen to
less than 10% (OK, so that's 1/2 an order :-).  By count, the percentage of
mail with 6 or more hops is only 6.65%.  A lot of those long paths are mailing
lists (one of my neighbors is on a LOT of lists).  I'm not saying that the
problem is gone; I think that it is definitely on the decline.  In another 2
years, IMHO, the problem will essentially be gone.  In the meantime, it is
not severe enough to warrant trashing uucp connectivity.

While looking through the paths to reply here, I did notice that a lot of the
many hop paths were connectivity/response tests.  In other words, people
sending mail to themselves through a site to see if it is alive.  Rabid
rerouting kind of makes this valid use of bang paths impossible.
-- 
Larry Blair   ames!vsi1!lmb   lmb@vicom.com