🚀 go-pugleaf

Steve Simmons (scs@iti.org) wrote:
: 
: Mail parks in general are a good thing.  We've had workshops on them at
: the LISA conferences the last two years; it was quite disappointing to
: see that some of the same folks from the first workshop came to the
: second but hadn't made one.  As a commercial provide I should probably
: regard that as a Good Thing, but I'd hoped for more action.

Steve, you know this is one of those things that national user
groups who have local affiliates (e.g. Sun Local User Groups, Usenix
local technical groups, etc) could really push for.  For one thing,
it's the sort of endeavor that is likely lead to a metro area IP
network (a la RAIN), and it's also the sort of effort that makes
a Freenet or other public access Unix seem to have a chance to take
off.  Both of those sort of environments are real good ones to make 
for effective organization of user groups.

Michigan I guess is pretty exceptional; there's sort of three domain
parks running in parallel, a <host.city.mi.us> collection, a <host.mi.org>
collection, plus Michigan User Group members can get a <host.mug.org>
address as part of their membership dues.  My rough count is six or seven
machines ready to MX in one way or another, ranging from best-effort free
at universities to small one-time fee (for people attached through another
Msen customer who's willing to carry the traffic) all the way to people
still calling out of state to hit UUNET.

From the commercial side of things, Steve, I'd say that the lack of a mail
park would be a Bad Thing if I was thinking about starting up a business 
in the area.  Free services are great for getting people up to speed, making
sure there's lots of skilled labor in the area, keeping your for-pay service
honest, and generally upping the expectations that people have about how their
mail should work.  Now just off the top of my head I can think of
	Michigan	.mi.org, .mi.us
	Minnesota	.mn.org
	Oregon		(RAIN)
	Texas		.lonestar.org
	Chicago, IL	.chi.il.us
in the US that have functioning parks going, plus
	Germany		.sub.org, .open.de, IN	
	Italy		.sublink.org
and no doubt plenty of others around.  *Not* everywhere tho.

  Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, Msen Inc. emv@Msen.com
        Msen Inc., 628 Brooks, Ann Arbor MI  48103 +1 313 998 GLOB