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From: dyer@spdcc.UUCP (Steve Dyer)
Newsgroups: net.mail
Subject: Re: Re: Gateway to AT&T Mail
Message-ID: <359@spdcc.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 24-Jul-86 00:28:28 EDT
Article-I.D.: spdcc.359
Posted: Thu Jul 24 00:28:28 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 24-Jul-86 05:16:41 EDT
References: <633@codas.ATT.UUCP> <123@einode.UUCP> <657@codas.ATT.UUCP> <288@micropro.UUCP> <682@gould9.UUCP>
Reply-To: dyer@spdcc.UUCP (Steve Dyer)
Organization: S.P. Dyer Computer Consulting, Cambridge MA
Lines: 37

>Personally, as far as I'm concerned, no UUCP site should accept mail
>from "attmail" unless it is allowed to return mail through "attmail"
>for free.  A site that expects others to take its mail for free but
>charges the same site for replies is a parasite, plain and simple.
>The fact that it is a for-profit parasite makes it worse.

This discussion is getting more and more bizarre by the minute.  Do people
read any more, or do they simply prefer to flame without using their brains?
"AT&T Mail" offers UUCP transmission for electronic messages between subscribing
hosts.  Usually, this is implemented as a one-hop: attmail!subscribinghost!user.
If anything, this is a convenience for hosts with UUCP access, so users can
avoid having to dialup their mailboxes, as is necessary for MCI Mail,
Compuserve, EasyLink, and other EMail services.  Now, I suppose that one
*could* put an arbitrary UUCP path after the subscriber host, but remember
that AT&T Mail didn't place it there, the orignator of the message did.  There
is clearly a need to be able to limit the ability of other sites to freely use
one's site as an AT&T mail gateway, but that is really a different issue from my
response to this series of flames.

BTW, any site which would accept mail from "attmail" would be an AT&T Mail
subscriber.  They won't call you, and you can't call them, if you're not.
AT&T Mail isn't a competitor to, or even a participant in, the USENET/UUCP
world.  Unfortunately, it can use the same transport mechanism and addressing
scheme (UUCP), and that brings an expected overlap with some of its customers.

>This issue won't be going away.  Unless attmail finds some gullible 
>fool, or cuts a deal like this with one or more sites, I suspect
>their connectivity on the net is going to gradually decrease to
>nothingness.

Hon, "AT&T Mail" doesn't seek any connectivity on the "net".  In fact,
as far as this issue goes, it's a fair bet that they'd be relieved if
the informal UUCP world didn't exist at all.
-- 
Steve Dyer
dyer@harvard.HARVARD.EDU
{linus,wanginst,bbncca,bbnccv,harvard,ima,ihnp4}!spdcc!dyer