🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <92Jan31.050624edt.233@smoke.cs.toronto.edu> path@cs.toronto.edu
	(probably Mark Moraes) writes:
>
>+ When planning your map entries, note that there are a lot of people
>  all over the world who seem to believe that they have a divine right
>  to route *any* mail traffic through published map links; they seem
>  unable to see the distinction between large files or news batches
>  and personal mail.  In my opinion, they're being inconsiderate and
>  reducing the usefulness of the UUCP network; however, I don't see
>  how this problem can be avoided without active cooperation from most
>  large UUCP sites.

In particular, watch out if you have a connection to uunet.ca.
Uunet.ca is very well-connected, and it is on the best route to
a large number of places.  Many sites would like to route mail
through it, even if they are not customers.  But connections to
uunet.ca cost real money, so most uunet.ca customers have
marked their connections to uunet.ca as "terminal", meaning that
they are not to be used for mail in transit to other places.

The result of this is that if you publish a connection to uunet.ca
that is not a "terminal" link, you instantly become one of the
few routes that sites who are not customers can use to get mail
to and from uunet.ca.  When our uunet.ca link was first published,
we declared it as usable by the world, expecting to route a small
quantity of third-party traffic.  The third-party traffic dwarfed
the mail originating and terminating on this machine by at least
a factor of 10!

We saw lots of mail that arrived at utai (in Toronto), made a trip
out to imax (in Mississauga), then back to uunet.ca (in Toronto),
for no other purpose than to have imax pay for the connection
to uunet.ca.  The same happened in the other direction.  Utai and
uunet.ca did much of the real forwarding work, but we paid for
the costs of crossing the "border" between uunet.ca customers
and non-customers.  It wasn't just casual mail either.  There
were a couple of mailing lists, one of which seemed to be good for
several messages a day.  There were a couple of megabytes of large
files, probably mail-based archive server output.

And when I protested to some of these people that the link was
there for casual mail, not heavy traffic, some of the people
responded politely and redirected their traffic, but others
said "if you don't want to handle mail, don't publish the link".
Basically, they wouldn't acknowledge that someone running a mailing
list, or generating considerable traffic by subscribing to a mailing
list or requesting archive service, has some responsibility to see
who is paying for the communications they are using.

After a bit of this, I gave up, and the imax-uunet.ca link is now
marked terminal in both directions.  The third-party traffic to/from
uunet.ca has dropped to a trickle, and I can get on with other work.
Of course, *someone* else is now handling the traffic that we declared
we didn't want.  They have my sympathy.

	Dave Martindale