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From: tower@buitc.bu.edu (Leonard (Len) H. Tower Jr.)
Newsgroups: ont.general,tor.general,ont.uucp,can.uucp,comp.mail.uucp,news.admin
Subject: Re: BITFTP grief!
Message-ID: <81678@bu.edu>
Date: 15 May 91 17:19:02 GMT
References: <1991May15.042146.29800@iguana.uucp>
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Reply-To: tower@bu-it.bu.edu (Leonard H. Tower Jr.)
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You might talk to the folks who run the BITFTP gateway, and see if
they could slow down the rate at which they mail a large request.  50k
an hour?  That requires them to have a lot of spooling space, but
would limit the harm done small systems who forward mail themselves.
Brian Reid's mail-based server (in use at a lot of Unix sites) does
something like this on a per-address basis.

You might also see if you can configure your mailer to bounch (or
bit-bucket (if you want to be rude)) messages larger then a certain
size (64k is traditional between UUCP hosts, though I've seen limits
as small as 25k from some of the oversea gateway machines).

I personally think any mail-based server that distributes any large
packages (source, data, et al) is doing a dis-service to the Matrix
(the world wide net as defined by John Quarterman).  It causes sites
who are willing to enlarge the community by passing small quantities of
human generated mail along to stop cooperating due to resource use
much larger then they can handle.  This makes the net a smaller and
less useful community for all of us.

thanx -len