Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!munnari.oz.au!mundamutti.cs.mu.OZ.AU!kre From: kre@cs.mu.oz.au (Robert Elz) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: Multicast. Message-ID: Date: 27 Apr 91 00:29:29 GMT References: <1991Apr22.203214.25117@sequent.com> <1991Apr25.175801.4209@zoo.toronto.edu> Sender: news@cs.mu.oz.au Lines: 26 henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: >We've never done a lot about this in C News, seeing nothing much wrong >with lines like: >daffy:sci.ducks/all::mail duckburg.BITNET!daisy gladstone@slobbovia.edu howard That's fine for one newsgroup that is mailed to lots of people, but isn't so great when you have lots of people getting lots of mix & match groups - esp if you'd really like to mail each article to each recipient just once, regardless of cross posting. >It's hard >for us to figure out what might be required when we don't use it ourselves. Perfectly reasonable - multicasting mail was never what the multicast stuff was for anyway (turned out to be useful as an afterthought). These days its just about impossible to dispatch individual articles (unbatched), which is what MULTICAST was originally for really, so the original rational is no longer as relevant as it once was (though we still use it here a bit - to speed local newsgroups to local recipients, so they don't need to be queued behind the morass of trash in the worldwide groups). kre