Re: Our pal, Netcom

[francis@tigana.microserve.com (John [Francis] Stracke)]

At 4:33 AM 9.01.96, John Strauss wrote:
>Tanner,
>
>        I think that atlantia-l is a fine and wonderful thing.
>But it really does seem as if Netcom is choking it.
[...]
>        I request that you look for a different home for the list.

The ISP where I have this PPP service will host a list for $15/mo plus a
$15 setup.  That's for 5000 outgoing messages/month; each additional 1000
msgs is an extra $2.  Anybody know how many people are on the list? ('cause
the # of msgs each of us sees will be multiplied by the # of recipients)

As for how to pay for it--take up a collection? (Me, I'd gladly give a
month or two's worth.) If we collected enough to pay for it for the first
year or two, it'd be stable enough to count on.  (Semi-silly idea: manifest
the Merry Rose Tavern at an event, as a fundraiser.  It'd certainly be a
stark contrast to sca-east, where the concept of naming the list at all was
roundly shouted down.  :-)

Or there may well be cheaper/better options.  (Maybe we'd prefer to
patronize an ISP somewhere in Atlantia.  :-) But, if we're willing to pay,
we ought to be able to find something better than Netcom (which isn't
charging at all, right?).

>Messages from netcom accounts are distributed with no real delay;

For what it's worth, this is probably a side effect, not deliberate
sabotage on Netcom's part.  Quick burst of geekery (non-geeks can stop
reading; there's nothing interesting left in this message): if sendmail
can't deliver a message immediately, it gets queued.  This means that, if
the system handling mail is overloaded--say, it can handle only N messages
per hour, and it's getting 2*N--then the queue will keep growing until the
load drops (in this case, it'll grow by N messages per hour).  But mail
from Netcom users probably gets processed on the machine they're sending
from, rather than going through the same machine that handles all the
inbound mail.  <rummage in DNS and SMTP...yup, I think that's right> Since
the user machines are less loaded (they'd have to be, or Netcom would lose
their customers), mail from them goes straight out.

To make things more confusing, the queue is serviced in reverse order.
Strange, but there is a good reason: if your mail is bogging down, you want
complaints to the postmaster to take priority over the normal traffic that
preceded them.

/===========================================================================\
|John (Francis) Stracke        | http://www.io.com/~francis | PGP key on Web|
|francis@tigana.microserve.com |============================================|
|Power Mac w/PPP               | Do not suspect that I am not human.        |
|My Mac, my opinions.          |                                            |
\===========================================================================/
  Francois Thibault          AFP of PA!       Shire of the Blak Rose (East)
  Argent, a cock gules, and, on a chief sable, three standing stones argent