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From: fozzie!stanley@uu.psi.com (John Stanley)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: EMAIL Flood and Use Deprivation
Message-ID: <13895@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 22 Oct 90 00:55:12 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 753, Message 5 of 6


  In the Network Guide Special Edition, and a recent normal edition,
the comments have been made that a flood of email to a user does not
prevent him or her from receiving wanted, or sending outbound, email.
Those who believe this, please consider the following points:

  1. Disk space is never unlimited, and a flood of email can quickly
fill a disk to overflowing. If this is the main system disk, this can
cause catastrophic failures. Even places like AT&T do not have
unlimited disk space. A catastrophic failure of the system most
certainly will prevent sending email. Before someone says "ahh, but
this is poor system management and not the emailer's fault", consider
the parallel to poor system management which allows guessable
passwords on root accounts and cracker breakin's. The system worked
until someone said "hey, lets all send mail to this system".

  2. Bandwidth is limited. Some companies are linked to the network
only through UUCP and a 2400 baud modem. If the mail flow reached the
point where the modem is in use 24 hours a day, when would outgoing
mail be sent? Of course, they should get a 9600 baud modem. They
should connect another system to the outside. Consider the parallel to
junk phone calls and the suggestion that the recipient should get a
second phone line if they want to be able to make calls.

  3. Money is limited. Some email systems charge for messages. When
the costs reach a certain point, guess what will be cut off? Consider
flooding an 800 number with calls. When an 800 number is no longer
cost effective because it is clogged, it gets turned off.

  4. Patience is limited. Those same companies using UUCP generally
have a friendly gateway that connects them for free. If the manager of
this free gateway determines that his system is overloaded because of
a flood of mail to one of his feeds, the easiest way to solve the
problem is to cut the feed. All of a sudden, no incoming or outgoing
mail.

  If someone decided to initiate a flood of mail to me, I would
quickly be overloaded. During the times I am getting my mail feed I am
not only unable to generate outgoing or read incoming mail, I am
unable to make voice phone calls. I have had to dump a UUCP connection
at times when I needed to make other calls. If the flood came to my
CIS account, it would quickly reach the point where I could no longer
afford to read it.

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get a 9600 baud modem. Get a second phone line.
Get a multi-tasking UNIX box so I can at least read and write mail
while the flood comes in. Right. Get a life. I have better things to
spend money on than the preventing the possibility I might someday be
overloaded with mail. If the solution doesn't save me money, I can't
implement it. Sounds a lot like a business, doesn't it?

  Finally, there was a comment about a flood of email to a corporate
leader not causing any damage. It most certainly will. At the extreme,
it will cause the termination of email to that site for one of the
above reasons. At least, it will make the executive stop reading his
own email, if he still did. Instead of having the ear of the boss, the
emailer will have the ear of the secretary who will probably not
understand anything in the mail and who will lump it in with
"complaints". A flurry of email messages will also decrease the signal
to noise ratio of the medium to the point that the effort to find the
pearls is not worth the benefit.

BTW, thanks for the network issue, and yes, please, Marty --
information on using fred@wp.psi.com.