Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ucsd!brian
From: brian@ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Re: Warning: April Fools Time again (forged messages on the loose!)
Message-ID: <530@ucsd.EDU>
Date: 1 Apr 88 14:48:02 GMT
References: <1590@sigma.UUCP> <4750002@hpscdc.HP.COM> <47838@sun.uucp>
Reply-To: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor)
Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd.
Lines: 18

Transmission isn't free for most sites.

The news software won't send an article to a site that already appears
in the Path: header line on the assumption that the article has already
been there.  If for some reason the article WERE to get to that site, it
would probably be rejected as a duplicate by the history mechanism, but
you'd have already paid for sending it twice - once needlessly.  That's
one of the BEST reasons I can think of for having that code in there.

Of course, you could take the Path: test out and see what happens; I'll
wager you'd see roughly a doubling of your transmission costs - twice
the phone bill, or network charge, or whatever - and of all the aspects of
Usenet, the real-money-for-the-phone-bill is the hardest one to justify/hide.

	Brian Kantor	UCSD Postmaster & Chief News Weenie
		UCSD Office of Academic Computing
		Academic Network Operations Group  
		UCSD B-028, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA
		brian@ucsd.edu	BRIAN@UCSD ucsd!brian