🚀 go-pugleaf

bei@io.com (Bob Izenberg) wrote: 

> Now, if you were a system administrator, and you had to
> choose whether to make a service available to the Net at
> large, and to commit your time to maintain it, how would
> the events that we're discussing affect your decision?

Good question. My answer is in 5 stages of increasing limitation. It does
not include shutting down the gateway. 

(1) 

If my system had the capacity to handle the current volume of
mail-to-usenet traffic from Compuserve, Prodigy, Netcom, Delphi and the
like, i think i would have accepted the offender's apology, talked things
over with AOL, and gone on from there. 

(Incidentally, i got a message from Zac at AOL the day before the gateway
was closed saying that the newsgroup admin (Bob) was on vacation but that
they hoped to resolve the situation with Fletcher on Monday. Fletcher
closed the gateway before that happened.) 

If i (as hypothetical system administrator again) could not get AOL to
promise to police their spam (although, you will recall that Fletcher said
in his adieu that they ARE paying attention to it now), i would write out
a bounced mail messge to be sent in response to the "average of 10 per
day" messages the gateway received from the AOL domain. ("Your message is
being returned because due to prior abuse, AOL and UT have agreed that the
cs.utexas.edu mail-to-usenet gateway is not open to senders from AOL until
further notice.")


(2)

If i felt that my gateway was overtaxed with messages from .com users in
general, i would have written a bounced mail message and henceforward
would have *politely* bounced ALL messages from .com domains. ("Your
message is being returned because the cs.utexas.edu mail-to-usenet gateway
is not open to senders from commercial internet service providers.")

(3)

If i felt i was still doing too much work, i would have written a bounced
mail message and henceforward would have *politely* bounced ALL messages
not originating at UT, other Texas .edu sites, or other .edu sites around
the country. ("Your message is being returned because the cs.utexas.edu
mail-to-usenet gateway is only open to senders .edu sites.")

(4)

If i felt i was still doing too much work, i would have written a bounced
mail message and henceforward would have *politely* bounced ALL messages
not originating at UT, or other Texas .edu sites. ("Your message is being
returned because the cs.utexas.edu mail-to-usenet gateway is only open to
senders from .edu sites in Texas.")

(5) 

If i felt i was still doing too much work, i would have written a bounced
mail message and henceforward would have *politely* bounced ALL messages
not originating at UT. ("Your message is being returned because the
cs.utexas.edu mail-to-usenet gateway is only open to senders from
utexas.edu.")

Thanks for asking. 

catherine yronwode