🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <56@harald.UUCP> d.jba@harald.ruc.dk (Jan B. Andersen) writes:
>As I see it, it's a political/economic problem. Someone must have
>registred the uk domain with SRI, and is therefore responsible for
>handling mail to/from that domain (or am I wrong?). Apparently this
>is the UKC, while at the same time some academic sites refuses to
>contribute to UKnet costs.

You are confusing three distinct things and imagine they are identical.
The UK domain is registered with SRI, but does not belong to UKC. It is
administered by the people at University College London (UCL), which
used to run the UK Internet gateway. The UK academic network - JANET -
is registered as AC.UK under the UK domain. It isn't administered by UKC
either. The UK UUCP network (UKnet) is run by UKC. It includes commercial
organisations and many academic sites. The UUCP academic sites use
JANET and its protocols instead of UUCP to move data because JANET
is free.

Not surprisingly, there are a lot of sites (a large majority) on JANET
that don't run UNIX or know (or care) about the world UUCP network. They
don't register as UUCP sites with UKC, so they make no committment to
pay any bills that UKC might incur on their behalf. When UUCP mail
arrives for these sites, UKC have the choice of either paying the bill
themselves or getting the UKnet members to pay someone else's bill or
refusing to forward the mail. None of these choices are acceptable.
Happily, it looks like the problem will go away for ALL ac.uk sites.
The people who run JANET have agreed in principle to fund the UK UUCP
gateway on the same basis as the other UK mail gateways. This will mean
free and unrestricted access for every site in the AC.UK domain.

>Therefore, mail to ac.uk should be via UKACRL.BITNET

No, no, no! A thousand times no! This is certainly a free route into the
UK. However this gateway is extremely stupid and not dependable. There's
little point in using that free gateway when it's highly likely that the
gateway cannot make sense of your mail. [Worse, it has been known to munge
headers out of all recognition so you cannot reply to mail that came in
though the gateway.] I have yet to successfully get mail out and back
through this gateway. At least UKC's gateway is robust and reliable,
although I have to pay for using it. I've never had a problem there.

My advice would be to only use UKACRL.BITNET in desparation as a last
resort. Wait for the restrictions at UKC to be removed and then use a
decent gateway that knows what it's doing and provides an excellent,
reliable service.

		Jim