Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!rpi!bu.edu!hsdndev!spdcc!iecc!Postmaster
From: johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us (John R. Levine)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Mail to/from Prodigy
Message-ID: <9012062303.AA29875@iecc.cambridge.ma.us>
Date: 7 Dec 90 04:03:49 GMT
Sender: Postmaster@iecc.cambridge.ma.us
Organization: I.E.C.C.
Lines: 27
In-Reply-To: <K%B^D-%@rpi.edu>

In article <K%B^D-%@rpi.edu> you write:
>Apologies if this has been discussed before, but is it possible
>to send mail between the internet (or bitnet) and prodigy?

Fat chance.  If you've been following the discussion in the Telecom digest
and elsewhere, Prodigy thinks that they're doing their users a big favor by
letting them send mail to each other at all, much less allowing a gateway to
other systems.

Prodigy was designed to be a one-to-many system, that is, users call up
regional concentrators which communicate with the main system.  Users are
supposed to spend their time looking at catalogs and stuff like that, fixed
shared screens which the regional concentrators can cache.  Since mail is
private, and they don't even know that all copies of a message addressed to
a mailing list are the same, each time you look at a mail message the
regional machine has to make a request to the main system, which loads the
regional-main links more heavily than they'd expected.  This problem is
exacerbated by their practice of delaying and censoring messages to the
public bulletin boards, which caused users to create mailing lists for their
semi-private conversations.

Rather than fix their system design, either by creating semi-public bulletin
boards or by creating a more efficient mail system, they have started charging
for mail messages.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us, {spdcc|ima|world}!iecc!johnl


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