Network hospitality abuse

[wex at milano.UUCP]

In article <3789 at utah-cs.UUCP>, donn at utah-cs.UUCP (Donn Seeley) writes:
> Does anyone have a suggestion for handling these awkward situations?

(referring to people shipping rogue sources across mail links and busting
them.)

The first thing to do is to update the new-users' guide to reflect this
problem (much the way it reflects problems of flammage today).  When we
want to chastise incorrect behavior we need to have a source of correct
information to point at.

Second, we need to expand the routing tables so that in addition to
frequency information, load information is also given.  The information
could contain an estimate of the amount of traffic a site is willing to
accept, and an estimate of how much they're currently accepting.  When a
mail message (or group of messages) would exceed the willing threshold, the
message(s) are delayed and the respective sysops are notified automatically.

They can then negotiate an appropriate action (and possibly examine the
contents of the mail).  They could decide to reroute it, to reject it, to
break it up into smaller chunks, to track down and lynch a repeat offender,
etc.

The costs of this idea are in sysop time and in getting and maintaining extra
database information.  Also, large messages will be slower to mail.  The
benefits are: reduced (and maybe eliminated) huge messages.  Additionally, we
might be able to catch bugs like that HP site that sent out their entire
news directory.  And, ultimately, we might be able to preserve some of the
more fragile links (thus improving things for everyone).

-- 
Alan Wexelblat
ARPA: WEX at MCC.ARPA
UUCP: {ihnp4, seismo, harvard, gatech, pyramid}!ut-sally!im4u!milano!wex

"We do not act as a result of consideration, but as a way of being."