Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!looking!brad From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) Newsgroups: news.misc Subject: Re: Posting for the rest of us Keywords: piontlessness and commonality Message-ID: <1596@looking.UUCP> Date: 2 May 88 05:56:29 GMT References: <4203@dasys1.UUCP> Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Lines: 44 In article <4203@dasys1.UUCP> jailbait@dasys1.UUCP (Richard Segal) writes: >One problem with the problem of (F)ollowingup vs. (R)eplying... >As I think we all know by now, (R)eply NEVER works. The variety of mailers >is such that it is impossible to hit (R) and place decent odd on the msg's >arriving. Sadly, this hits the nail on the head, at least of late. If we could actually work out the cost to us in terms of: a) Long signatures made by people who don't trust mailers b) The cost of long bounced messages c) The cost of postings that say, "I couldn't get mail through to Joe, so here's a private message for him" in terms of transmission and wasted human reading time d) The cost of followups that would have been mail if it worked more reliably That we would find the horrid broken mailer problem is actually costing a great deal. We all sit around, not having the time to fix things, but that's af false economy. We can fix this, though. First we have to insist (rather than suggest) that any site that wants a news or mail feed that shows to the outside world *HAS* to register itself with the maps. How do we insist on this? The backbone sites modify their inews to examine the "From" line of every message. If the domain there isn't found in the database of known domains, the message is tossed on the floor. What about the time between hook up and distribution of your registration? There are a couple of answers: a) You don't get to post for the first while, just listen b) New site registrations get updated daily to backbone sites, or c) For the first while you generate a From address using your feed's name, such as user%mysite@feed.uucp, and then switch to a proper address when your name is registered. I'm tired of watching up to 30% of mail bounce, and I'm one hop from a backbone site. We can do this, and it only requires a fairly simple change (in the case of option a) on a couple of dozen machines. We can do this NOW. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473