Grex Coop10 Conference

Item 22: Motion to Restrict Non-Members to Sending Local E-Mail Only

        This is to discuss a motion which I want to put to a member
vote:  Restricting non-members to sending "local" e-mail only
(that is, within Grex).
        I think we need to significantly change Grex' priorities.
We started out as a conferencing system (including party) with
e-mail as an add-on.  Now, through no one's fault, we have turned
into a free world-wide e-mailer with a shrinking conferencing system
as an add-on.
        I am *really tired* of having the System flooded with people
who don't participate at all in conferencing, using Grex to e-mail
people far away.  I feel exploited--taken advantage of.  And when
it gets to the point that non-member e-mail is so large in volume
that Grex has to be shut down to process the mail, it is time for
a change.  The concept of buying a separate machine to handle all
this free e-mail shows how far gone we are.   8-)
        Anyway, if we say that non-members are perfectly free to send
e-mail, but *only* to other Grexers, two things will magically happen:
        1.  Presto!  No longer will people wait in long queues to get
in here and use us for free e-mail.  We will no longer see load
averages routinely over 20.  Members will actually be able to
*get in* and use Grex.  Strangely believe it.
        2.  Non-members who *are* conferencers will need to decide
if they want to send mail off-site.  Remember, under my proposal
they would still be able to e-mail their friends on Grex.  If
they do want off-site mail, they would become members.
        We are stuck at about 100 members now.  This is barely
enuf to pay the bills.  If we pick up 50 or so new members who
*are* members of the Grex community and would like to send off-site
e-mail, that would be great!  We wouldn't have to worry about those
occasional heart-stopping months when no money comes in.
        I would like to hear comments on my proposed motion.

I don't know what the threshold is after which grex must take action to save
itself from "mail overload", but I don't happen to think it's at/near that
point.  So I would oppose this restriction.  I know that if I couldn't have
done internet e-mail from grex without being a member, I never would have come
to grex to begin with, and therefore would never have become a member.  Until
grex has exhausted technological means to deal with the mail "problem", I'm
not going to vote to restrict non-member e-mail.

This is premature....lets wait to see how it is with the faster connection
and with mail put off on a second machine.  The faster connection will
make grex a far more desireable email alocation though (to use grex
regularly for email now you have to be something of a masochist...most
regular users Iknow forward their mail elsewhere)    This could be
reasonable in the long run if there is no other solution though.

My heavens, I agree with Richard...  let's follow through on the 
current plans and then re-evaluate our condition.

I will definitely vote against this, if it comes to a vote.  The problems
it's intended to address are serious ones, but it goes way too far.
There are quite a lot of folks who contribute to this system, in terms
of extensive participation in conferencing etc., who send and receive
a small amount of offsite email, and who aren't members.  I personally
think that's fine.  I was once one of them, with no other email access
whatever I might add.  (*That* is a lot rarer than it was back then,
but I doubt it will totally go away any time soon.)

Historically, one of the goals of this system has been to minimize the number
of things differentiated by membership.  We should keep it that way.

I think Grex would be the big loser if we did this.  We would likely gain some
members, but IMO we'd lose a *lot* more participants.  In the long run it
might well create a net loss of members.  I know I would be a lot less
likely to remain a member with every step in this direction, myself.

(Ken slipped in at #3)

   I am absolutely against using e-mail as a "stick" to get more people
to provide money to Grex.

   M-Net is complete proof that using the stick approach does not
work, and indeed has negative consequences far beyond the original
situation that created the need for said stick.

   Grex *MAY* have to restrict email at some point in the future.
I will not say that we won't ever--but I think Grex owes it to the
concept of being a free and open system to try and come up with
some imaginitive solutions to the problem first, before implementing
a mundane solution to the problem, which will have other unseen
side-effects.

   I can't go into specifics now, but there are two different
tracks I want to see us take before we think of restricting things.

   The first is social.  We have not done a good job of explaining
things about Grex to newcomers, at newuser time.  We desperately
need to re-word the beginnings of the "Tragedy of the Commons"
screen and point people to other email solutions that are far
better than Grex is.  When I originally wrote that section of
the newuser text, places like hotmail did not exist.  Now they
do, and for people in a web-browser oriented environment, they
provide far superior mail service than we ever can.  We need to
tell people about this howevert, which we never have, at all.

   The second is technical.  The impact of email on Grex is
not nearly the bandwidth coming in as CPU impact when mail is
delivered here.  Each time mail is delivered to Grex a seperate
sendmail process must be started up to deal with it.  Over the
course of a day thousands of sendmails start up.  During peak
periods we can have 15 or more copies of sendmail running,
each handling a different piece of mail (as I type this at
3:57pm there are 6 sendmails running).  During these peak
periods Grex bogs down, simply because there are so many
instances of sendmail going.

   There is a solution, which this morning just became much
closer to reality.  There is a concept called an "MX record"
associated with a domain name (cyberspace.org) that tells
machines on the net where to rooute mail to for any domain
name.  We can create a "mail.cyberspace.org" machine and have
it collect all mails from the Internet, such that *it* takes
the continuous hits all the time, thus freeing Grex from
that task.  The mail machine can then send what is likely
to be one eternal stream of data into Grex, thus ridding
Grex of the myriad of sendmail connections.

   Last weekend during a bike ride that I helped provide
communications for, I talked to a friend who has always
approved of the concept of Grex.  When I mentioned the
concept of the MX machine, he volunteered at least part
of a 486 system.  I'm pleased to say that I got mail from
him today, indicated that we can have a 33MHz 486 system
with 16M ram, box and power supply.  To make this an MX
system we will need an ethernet card (which we have),
a monochrome video card/monitor (which I think we have
or at least we have the monitor), an EIDE controller
(I believe I have one promised to us) and an IDE disk.
I know we have a spare keyboard or two.

   With open BSD or FreeBSD on it, and Grex's sendmail,
we have a mail machine.  Besides freeing Grex up from
the never ending task of collecting mail, it provides
the ability for us to continue to receive mail when Grex
is down.  A 200M disk would give us at least two days
worth of mail holding ability, and probably more than
that.

   I will be entering more about this in the garage
conference.

   Before we take drastic measures that will change
Grex in very fundemental ways, I think we should opt
for the more creative solutions first, that benefit
all.

   Grex needs to deal with growth issues.  There is
essentially no way that we can provide everything for
all the people on Earth, but we can at least take
every step possible to extend ourselves in novel ways,
and see how far that helps us, before taking the 
more predictable and mundane "solution" of shutting
things down.

I absolutely, positively, cannot endorse such a movement.  It creates too much
of a separation between member and nonmember.  Its the kind of move that could
destroy everything grex is about, singlehandedly... we'd lose thousands of
users, and not just non conferencers, either.  Any gain in memberships would
be moot, I'd think.  The loss of people like me who couldn't support such a
system (I refuse to support m-net for similar reasons, though this is far more
drastic) would more than make up for it.  For the moment, though, my check
is still imminent.

I think steve has a much better way of going at it.

I totally agree with Dave's response #4.

Too, dpc, Grex was not started to be a system for
conferencing and only conferencing.  If that had been
the case Grex wouldn't be as open as it is with
access to Unix tools.  Grex is a community resource
not a club.  We may someday have to retool for lack
of volunteer staff or funding or whatever but I
hardly think we have good reason to panic at this 
point.

I don't in any way resent non-paying users.  Many
contribute in other ways besides sending in money.
And some simply use resources and don't give back.
That's okay, I'm willing to subsidize those folks
in order to keep the system open and welcoming of
all.  The way I look at it is that there are 
charitable organizations I might use from time to
time to which I don't contribute a dime.  So it
all works out.   

   Thanks mary.  You brought up the points I didn't
make, when I first responded.

I agree with what the folks opposing this have said, and don't
really have anything to add except to say that I do agree.

It stinks!

dpc ? I am getting confused, are you M-net treasurer or Grex treasurer ?

Who can tell?  >8)

  Now, now.  Dave has an entirely legimate reason to think about the
impact that mail has upon Grex.  Lots of things have impact on Grex,
and need to be thought about.  What we need to do however, it look
at *all* the options we have, and make Grex the best it can possibly
be.

suggesting an idea for discussion and comment is the part and parcel
of conferencing. this is the conference for discussing *how* to
create a 'grex in our own image.' 
  
i am partial to a nudge here and there - call it a stick if you want - 
but some functions *are* reserved to stimulate contributions.
  
maybe this is to much of a 'nudge' but this is a discussion, not
a conclusion or implementation.

Indeed, but using such stimulations to attempt to create some sort of
hierarchy (as it obviously occuring on mnet, much to my dismay) destroys the
feeling of community.  One of the best things about grex is the huge diversity
of people, not all of whom necessarily need to be forking money.

The more I think about it, the more I think that we really need to get a
separate machine for mail purposes, if possible to relieve normal system
resources of that role.  If it's slow, that's fine:  Mail doesn't really need
to be fast, and grex isn't a mail server anyway.  I'm willing to contribute
anything I can (which probably isn't much) to the project.

Has a non-member who doesn't pay I  would ant (want) e-mail.

I appreciate the well thought out comments!  Senna, we obviously
have a hierarchy now: About 100 members are carrying the financial
burdens.  Unfortunately, we don't *presently* have the capacity to
provide e-mail to the world, and doing so is bogging down the machine.
        I'm *very* glad to hear from steve that we may be able to
have a "mail machine" in the future.  Two questions arise:
(1) How much will establishing the mail machine cost in cash?
Or is everything to be donated?  (2)  *When* will this happen?
In a few days?  A month?  Or will it be like the 670 project?
        Also, I do not believe that people who use us as a free
e-mailer and don't conference are part of our "community".  
They are simply people who are taking advantage of us.
I'm tired of it.  I'm *not* tired of non-members who conference.
        Everybody wants free stuff.  Unfortunately, providing
free e-mail is preventing us from having a functioning conferencing
system, at least right now.
        When can the "Tragedy of the Commons" screen be rewritten?

Ignoring (for the moment) the technical issues of implementing this
proposal, I seriously doubt this proposal would save very much
bandwidth.  This proposal would only limit the ability of non-members to
*send* mail.  It would not limit, in the slightest, their ability to
*receive* mail.  Probably at least half of the mail that is delivered on
grex is some form of list mail, originated off-site.  Since nearly all
of our users have some form of off-site internet access, it would still
be easy for most of them to subscribe to off-site mailing lists, using
their grex mailbox address.

According to the estimates of one grex staff member who was watching the
mail log, about 50% of all sendmail requests made on grex are being made
to deliver mail to mailboxes that have filled up.  Our mail software
tries to be "nice" - when a user's mailbox fills up, instead of telling
other mail systems "give up, the user is dead", it says "try again later
- maybe the problem will fix itself".  The theory behind this is that
users will log in, notice the large scary notices that "login" gives
about their mailbox being full, plus the fact that they aren't getting
any more mail, and will go fix it.  Assuming they catch it within 3
days, there's a good chance they won't miss any messages.  So much for
theory.  In practice, some users subscribe to high volume mailing lists,
then apparently manage to drown in the resulting flood of e-mail.
Eventually, their mailbox fills up, and if they haven't logged in in a
while, staff kills their account.  This is obviously sub-optimal, and
there are plans to improve the logic here.  For the moment, however,
this is what the software does.

An important factor to keep in mind here is that there are probably very
good reasons why people come here to use the "free" e-mail.  Let's face
it, "free" e-mail on grex is not exactly wonderful.  We don't provide
"pop" access, we're very slow, and we can't even receive mail from MSN
or hotmail.  Most companies and ISP's already provide "free" e-mail to
their users, and there several other companies that offer "free" e-mail
to anyone in the world, with a better user interface, and more speed.
People are not coming here *just* because we offer "free" e-mail, and
the people coming here are willing to tolerate significant nuisances in
order to use mail here.

Certainly, one of the reasons people might come here is for "privacy".
For instance, they might be homosexual, pagan, or have other perfectly
legitimate reasons why they would prefer to do their "private" mail
somewhere else besides at work.  Another perfectly legitimate reason is
that they may have friends who already use grex.  It's easier to have a
friend show you how to use the system they use, than to use another
different system on your own, even if that different system would be
faster and easier to use.  Another reason may be that unlike most other
free e-mail providers, grex provides a relatively full feature Unix
shell account, including procmail and other goodies.  Users who are used
to unix may find grex more attractive and other goodies.  We may be
attracting a set of "power users", who are willing to put up with the
slower speed of grex in return for the more powerful tools.

The "friends" effect could have a further insidious effect.  We already
have plenty of users from India who log in to grex to exchange mail (and
even run "talk") to communicate with one another.  Since the mail would
be sent to a "local" grex user, it would not be blocked by dpc's
proposal.  These Indian users may have friends on other systems as well.
It is possible that these users might decide to do *all* their mail on
grex, rather than doing *some* of it on grex, and *some* of it
elsewhere.  The net result could be an *increase* of mail traffic and
usage on grex, rather than a *decrease*.

I hate this idea, dpc.  GREX is intended (among other things) as a 
community resource to give people access to technology they wouldn't 
otherwise have access to.

If email is a problem, then as STeve says, we need to find ways to 
manage the problem and to let newcomers know that if all they want is 
email, there are better places to get it.  

We need to keep the doors open, while letting folks know that we're 
primarily a community that they're very welcome to join rather than 
primarily a "free e-mail provider".

I think dpc's idea is a pretty good one and nothing anyone has said so far
has caused me to change my mind.  Grex can still be a community resource
without offering everything to everyone, diluting capabilities and costing
much more for the very few who are willing to contribute.
Its pretty much the same people over and over again who support Grex
finacially and there should be some safeguards that our financial input will
at least maintain the services we have had in the past.

We might have a hierarchy, but we dont' flaunt in the way mnet does, assigning
any paying member it can to some authority position and having little "member
of the month" trinkets telling everybody how great certain members are.  

It's true that we can't provide everything to everyone, but I think it's 
very important to what GREX is to provide as many services as open 
handedly as we can and when we can't meet a need to act as an source of 
information about where that need *can* be met.

Yeah, a handful of us support GREX financially -- but we do it for the 
common good, not as a payment for service.  (At least, that's the 
theory...)  It would be great to get others to take up a corner of the 
load, but we're getting by.  I think too much money suddenly coming in 
has the potential to be as ruinous as does the money stopping.

   Thats not just theory Misti, but fact, I think, because we
don't have hordes of members.  The people who do fork over money
really do believe in Grex I think.  Certainly some dontate for
much more specific reasons, but I think that overall we've done
a good job of keeping to those goals that we started with.

   Audrey, do you think that things are worse now for members
than they were in the past?

what we also believe about/in grex is that the profligacy will cease
soemtime, somewhere, somehow. to the best of my knowledge, correct
me if incorrect, there have been zero occurrances of 'improvements'
which were not also, always 'co-opted' by diluting the improvement
over vaster ##s of logins resulting in disproportionate progress
for the donators to grex - and essentially jack shit supoort from
the increased dissipation.

Obviously Grex is not very good "value" for the paying members, so it 
must be the community service we support.  Email is a load but it is 
also the most important service to the community.  We *are* A charity, 
after all.

   TS, another way of looking at it is that there has never been
an improvement to Grex that hasn't been used.  *everything* is
more active now than it used to be.  The level of conferencing
today dwarfs that of the first months of Grex's existence.

   Scott is quite right: regardless of the curent legal/IRS
definitions of charity, we that.

Personally, the less open Grex is, the less I like it.  I *like* providing
free email to 16,000 people. It makes me feel that I'm doing something useful
with my time and money, as well as learning a lot.  I don't think Grex is
suffering from giving away email.  Conferencing is good, as far as I'm
concerned.  I conference just as much as I did a year ago, and two years ago,
and there is as much for me to do as there was then.  If I get a little more
time, as I have recently, there's more for me to do.  Case in point, I
recently joined, for the first time, the music cf. I don't think email load
is killing Grex.  I wouldn't mind seeing Grex faster, but not at the expense
of one of the things I like about it.

STeve, grex is a charity within the "legal/IRS definitions". 

   Yes, I know that--but I'm talking about Grex being a charity in
the sense that we give things away, not in the legal/IRS/whatever
which we may, or may not align with.  Sorry, I didn't express myself
well enough.

   Marcus ignored the technical part of this proposal, but issues
regarding the technical side have been gnawing at me, while driving
to work.  The more I thought about it the more nearly impossible
it looks.

   Anything that has an entry in the password file (/etc/passwd)
can receive mail, as well as anything in the master alises file 
(/etc/aliases).  To prevent someone from sending mail completely
is reletively easy.  To allow some to use mail for particular
destinations would mean altering sendmail itself, such that 
a particular person, if on some list would be able to send 
"local" mail only.  At first glance, this sounds easy: look
for an "@" and if you see it then deny the mail, since it
uses a domain name and presumabely is offsite.  However, an
illicit mailing list of one person, on another account with
one line in a .forward file would allow anyone to send mail
out to a particular person anywhere on the net, and would
bypass our system of checking.  As long as the account that
held the .forward file was a member, any number of people
could use the .forward to point where they'd like mail to go:
just permit the file 777 (read/write/execute to the whole world)
and poof, an instant system of getting around our "local"
mail policy for non-members, in the outbound direction.

The inbound direction presents horrors of its own.  Every
time a piece of mail starts coming into Grex, sendmail would
have to look the user up and determine if its allowed to get
mail, accept it if so, or bounce it if not.  Given that the
newuser program would still be running (at least I hope it is)
we would have a never ending stream of people getting accounts
here not realizing that they can't accpet mail, and causing
mail to come to Grex, making for a never ending stream of
bounce messages all over the place.  Grex will be "loved"
by a lot of people for that.

All in all, it *is* possible to achieve this, but at great
cost.  Cost in terms of staff time to implement something
truely strange, staff time to deal with pissed system
admins all over the world.  The worst cost would be the
abandoning of one of Grex's best principals, that of giving
people access to email.

From the technical side, I think it's fair to assume that the
vast majority of the non-members wouldn't try fancy ways around a
restriction on sending e-mail.  A few would, but most would say "OK, Grex
isn't for free e-mail."
        I didn't see any answers to my "when will this happen?" questions
on the prospective donated e-mail machine, steve.  I'd appreciate if you
could follow up on this.
        Someone from "another system far, far away" across Main Street
said that the main reason Grex and that "other system" are so popular for
e-mail is that allows people anonymity, and that the major use of
anonymous e-mail is the transfer of sexual files.  Is this right?  If so,
what kind of "community" have we really got here, folks?
        I can see that it might not be fair to cut off services that our
present non-members have come to expect.  I am considering amending my
motion to say that it would apply only to *new* non-member accounts;
existing accounts would be "grandparented in".

I'll actualy vote just to vote no to this.

   No Dave, that isn't a fair assumption, that the non-techies
won't circumvent it.  I say this because the Indian population
that uses Grex mostly for mail is *very* technical, and very
good at communicating amoungst themselves.  Once a small group
of people know about some little trick, lots will.

   People use the anonymous abilities of Grex for a wide variety
of things.  Actually, *most* grex mail use, as far as I have
ever been able to determine, is simply becuase people don't have
another way of getting to a stable email system other than a place
like us.  I stopped counting the number of unemployed people
who used Grex to send out resumes, after I hit something around
20.  I've seen homeless folks use Grex too.  I met two of them
at the library last year.

   Do some people use Grex for sexually oriented mailing lists?
Absolutely.  But I don't think its anywhere near a majority.
Its just another speciality group.  being on staff I can see
the mail queue.  Its often the case that mailing list traffic
is readily observable by the addresses which are shown in the
queue; I am always astonished to see the incredible variety
of things that people are subscribed to.  Horse raising lists,
book discussions, building lists, cooking exchanges, travel
groups.  Pencil collectors, railfan lists (trains), doll
collectors.  Those are some of the lists I suspect traveling
through Grex at one point or another.

   Do we have "nasty" uses for Grex?  Absolutely.  Does the
phone company? Sure--but that doesn't mean that we should
curtail the phone system just because someone can use them
for nasty purposes.

   So it is with Grex.

I grant you, Dave, that some people may be doing slimy things with 
their access to e-mail on GREX.  But I don't think it's 
a) the most common reason for getting an account on GREX or 
b) any of our business unless it disrupts our system or breaks a law.

I think GREX is a popular e-mail provider because we have a cool 
address, because we're out there providing free email in a form that 
doesn't require fancy software, and because people have heard of us.

Quite a few of our best people came here originally for the free local 
email.  They've gone on to fancier providers in some cases, but they're 
still here in our community, contributing interesting ideas, and in some 
cases money and technical skills.

It's true that not everyone who uses GREX for e-mail will bother to 
become a member of our community.  Why should they?  We may not be all 
that interesting to them nor them to us.  So?  

I'd like to see the conferences grow ever more active, but I'm a lot 
more concerned with quality than with quantity.  That goes for 
memberships, too.  I'd far rather give a little more myself to support 
GREX than see a whole rash of memberships bought under mistaken 
assumptions about what membership in GREX means.

   Thank you, Misti.  There are some many things I want to say
about all this, but can't seem to get the right words for.  Most
forunately, others are expressing my views quite nicely.

Re #30: we give things away...in the legal/IRS/whatever, STeve. We are
given donations, and we give away communication resources that we buy with
those donations. I guess I don't understand the distinction you are
making.  Grex is as charitable as any other charitable organization,
within IRS regulations. 

   OK, I'll buy that.  I was saying (poorly, it seems) that quite
disregarding what official rules say we're a charitable organization.

STeve, I think you are still confused. Grex does not have 501(C)(3) status,
but that only means that people can't treat their donations as tax-deductible.

That is a separate question from whether we are a charity.

In my opinion we will be granted the status, if we only apply for it.
Even if not, it will be because of some technicality, not because we are not
a charity.

I would like to find something else to use as a carrot to encourage
memberships. I don't think memberships are tainted for having been motivated
by some kind of carrot. I don't think e-mail should be it, though.
So I don't really like dpc's proposal here.

One of my main concerns is that conferencing in Grex is in a *serious*
decline.  Valerie posted some data at my request showing that over the
past several years, the amount of stuff in the Winter Agora has been
shrinking.  
        Steve, you mentioned above the possible donation of a mail machine.
I still haven't seen any time lines for this.  Can you estimate when
this might happen?

This response has been erased.

   I'm working on getting the particulars of the mail machine together
Dave.  Sorry for forgetting to respond when you first asked.  No, I can't
give an estimate of when it will be ready.  I'll be talking about it
more in the garage item I need to enter this weekend.

   I guess I really haven't stated myself well about this charity bit.
I'm trying to say I *don't care* about the legal definitions of what
constitutes a charity--Grex is one, from the human perspective.  Now,
if Grex manages to align itself with the current legal/IRS definitions,
great.  

Re #39: I disagree that conferencing on Grex is in "a serious
decline". And be that as it may, it is not clear that enacting
this proposal would do one thing to improve it. If anything, I
would expect the reverse.

And also, being as every edition of Agora contains more material
than I can keep up with, how is it a problem that there may be
somewhat less now than in previous years? That may even
represent an improvement rather than a decline, if what remains
is of higher quality. (By whatever standards one chooses to
measure "quality".)

I have been reading agora for years, and I have just as much (read way too
much) interesting stuff to follow as I did then.  I see less items, but then
I see very few items saying "help" because we aren't dumping newbies into
agora.  I also fail to see how this would improve conferencing.  I don't find
it too slow.  Granted, I dial in, not come in over the telnet connection, but
we will have a faster net connection in a month.  I guess I just fail to see
what we gain by this, at all.  I do see what we lose, tho.

Ahhh! I get it, STeve - you don't want to fill out the IRS 1023 form... :)

If we limit mail, then chances are that new people will be hard to come by,
and agora will just become the same people batting the same ideas around
season after season.. nothing new.  Our current format encourages new users
to participate, whether they pay or not.  

   It certainly is the case that we've gotten conferencing users who
originally came for 'free' things like talk and email and ultimately
discovered the conferences.

Regarding the technical stuff, STeve says we'd have to worry about
"inbound" mail.  In a sense, that's not really a problem, because dpc's
proposal allows inbound mail just fine to local users, just not outbound
mail.  We already have a significant # of people who fetch their mail
via "ftp".  Those people won't be at all fazed by a restriction on
outgoing mail.

In another sense, however, that doesn't "really" make the problem go
away, because there are a lot of ways to originate mail on grex, and
we'd have to be very careful in distinguishing between mail that truely
was originated remotely, and mail that was originated locally.  Some of
the ways mail could be originated include:
        telnet localhost smtp
        telnet 152.160.30.1 smtp
        /usr/lib/sendmail -bs
        /usr/lib/sendmail
        mhmail
        pine
        elm
        mail
Accompanying the mail are also a relatively complicated set of
addresses, including the forward & return paths, & various addresses
contained within the mail itself.  The logical place to implement dpc's
proposal would of course be inside sendmail - in fact, there's a routine
"checkcompat" that would seem to be the place where such a check would
need to be implemented.  However, the problem is that this routine
doesn't really have enough information to provide a robust authorization
check.  As STeve also points out, .forward files would make the whole
process that much more complicated.  Dealing properly with error
notifications would also be very difficult, if not impossible.

I would not care to argue that a mailing list on sexual fetishes, or an
AIDS support list, is any less valuable than a mailing list on golf, or
a mailing list for fans of Odo.  This is, after all, people's private
mail, and personal business, that we're talking about here.  The
important thing to remember here is not the specific reasons people
might choose to do mail here rather than in some more convenient place,
but that those reasons exist, and that they can be very powerful reasons
- reasons that will drive a significant fraction of our population to
find very creative solutions to their needs, if we don't provide for
them.  I do think, however, that we *can* meet the reasonable e-mail
needs of most of our users, and that there is real value in doing so.
In a sense, e-mail is just as much about people communicating with one
another as is computer conferencing, and it would be highly hypocritical
of us to try to get out of the e-mail business.

Thanx for forging ahead on the mail machine stuff, steve!
        I continue to be intrigued by how our users are supposed to
be ready to *circumvent* limits on their use of Grex.  I guess
I'm not ready to conclude that by and large Grexers would be
dishonest enough to work around limits which we set in order
to free up Grex for more conferencing.  Maybe I'm wrong here.
        Marcus, what do you think the "reasonable needs of most
of our users" are?

I'm not interested in the issue of circumvention, since I think
the whole proposal is a bad idea to begin with.

I think the idea is a bad one too. People who cant afford email accounts
anywhere else would also lose access here? In most cases, those who need to
receive email here also need to send it from here.  Why should we suddenly
say you can communicate with Grexers and non-Grexers alike in party and
conferences, but only with Grexers in email? 

Staff sees a steady progression of "root kits" being imported onto grex,
and run without success.  These "root kits" are basically packaged up
tools that computer vandals use to try to break into computers.  They
don't work on grex, but it's quite clear that there is a significant
number of people out there who would very much like to "circumvent"
every limit possible on grex.  (Although these people are a constant
reminder of the importance of proper computer security, they amount to <
1% of all users on grex.)

The "root kit" vandals are actually not usually very scary, because they
aren't (usually) very interested in grex.  Grex is, to them, just
another SunOS system with another password database; if they can't break
in easily, they'll usually leave quite quickly for better pickings
elsewhere.  We've had other people on grex who have exploited various
other "limits" in more interesting ways.  For instance, "party" is of
course quite popular, and some of the more frequent users have found
various holes in party that allowed them to perform various kinds of
mischief.  After a bit, of course, the problem becomes well-known, and
Jan fixes it.  You'll have to ask Jan for more details; I remember only
that it happened.

Another sort of "limit" has to do with login.  Once upon a time, you
could run "/bin/login", even after you logged in.  It would (of course)
log you in over again, & change the entry in wtmp.  It wouldn't,
however, log you out.  You would be on both as the "new" person (in the
process that had just exec'd login), and as the "old" person (in the
parent process.) At one point, "newuser" depended on this feature of
"login", and it was also sometimes used by people to allow someone else
to temporarily login (for security reasons, we had to disable "su"...)
But it was also possible to login as a "fake" user, such as "who", or
"newuser", then log out (as the "new" person), leaving the original
login session (the "old" person) active, but with the wtmp record of the
"new" person listed in "who".  People learned to do this and the news
spread fairly rapidly in a certain crowd of users, who dubbed this
procedure "cloaking".  While it didn't pose any real security nuisance
(we could still look at process accounting logs, the output of "ps", and
even the wtmp log to figure out that this had happened) it was still a
nuisance.  Eventually, as other changes were made to telnetd, newuser, &
login, the need and support for this "feature" was eliminated, and it is
no longer a problem today.

One of the current problems that faces grex is that of mailing lists.
There are plenty of people on the internet who want to find a home for
their mailing lists.  Mailing lists pose a particular problem, because
the people on the list don't care if the mail server takes a few hours
to deliver their mail.  Grex definitely doesn't have the resources to
act as a mail server.  Even though we try to make this pretty clear up
front, some people ignore this.  Most of those people do give up once we
make it clear mailing lists really aren't tolerated here, but a few
people are more persistant.  Some of those people are getting more
creative about how they store their mailing list.

To summarize: yes, there is a small fraction of people on grex, who will
try to circumvent limits on their use of grex.  Most of those people are
pretty stupid, but a few are pretty smart.  It only takes one smart one
to tell all his friends, to become a pretty big problem.

I don't think there's much reason to get hung up about the exact
definition of what "reasonable needs of most of our users" is.  The
important thing is, most people seem to agree that internet e-mail
access is a good service to offer everyone.  Only a few people seem to
be bothered by the notion that they might be paying for "other people"
to have "free e-mail".  If this were a commercial service, that might be
a legitimate gripe.  I don't think it's legitimate here however.  One of
the things your grex dollar buys you, is the ability to support a
community of many different kinds of people, doing many different
things.  Inevitably, not all of those things are going to be things you
are interested in.  There may be conferences, or even whole applications
you don't particularly care for.  As long as you value that diversity,
however, it should still be worthwhile for you to donate.  I don't think
anyone here is arguing grex should become *just* an e-mail system.  I do
think it's pretty obvious however, that there are plenty of people who
believe that e-mail is an important *part* of computer conferencing, and
that this *includes* e-mail off-site, as well as on-site.

I totally oppose this motion.  dpc should be shot for suggesting
it.

The reason I entered #0 is that the "free e-mailer to the world"
function is overwhelming the other functions.  

If it was REALLY necessary to do something about excessive mail flow,
woudnt it be a better idea to simply go to hard disk quotas.  Couldnt grex
be programmed to disallow individual logins from exceeding some set disk
space quota, like 1,000 KB or something.  Setting a low max limit would
encourage users to not store excessive files on grex and not overuse
email.

One freenet I use repeately warns that it will go to hard disk quota if
user dont voluntarily control their email and files (and this disk usage)
Of course theyhave a disk space problem and grex doesnt.  But that doesnt
mean grex couldnt go to quotas simply as a means of keeping the house in
order and controlling email

In fact, isnt there some arbitrary quota already used by staff...I mean I
assume once in a while staffcomes upon a login with out of control files
taking up tens of thousands of kilobytes of disk space and has to start
wiping out files.

Grex does have a disk quota of 1 MB.  It's an honor system thing.  However,
turning on software enforced disk quotas would cause a lot of overhead that
would slow Grex down a lot.

a) grex is not the mailer for the world, trust me, I've seen systems
a lot larger than grex out there, such as nether.net
b) let the sysadmins tell you about network io overhead waiting for a slow
internet connection to pass data, so the processes stick around in memory 
waiting to do that network/io waiting for a slower net connection to pass
data.
c) spammers suck disk space, and suck. there's not much you can do about
it, it's not going to be illegal anytime to  spam folks

m-net/grex were my first internet e-mail, it was great, I didn't have to
pay for it, etc..
I don't want folks who just find the system to have to pay to get what
was once free.

(I think this should be linked to agora)

Is there any decent way to implement mail quotas?  (Each user gets so many
KB/week total inbound+outbound or something similar.)  

nether is bigger than grex?

yes, nether is bigger than grex.

Re 59 - Given how much unsolicited commercial e-mail I've been
getting lately, a mail quota would be a BAD plan.  I'd be about
ready to kill someone if a message from my girlfriend was deleted
because someone had sent me important information about making
money on the Internet.

This response has been erased.

My mom is one of those free E-mail parasites who could easily pay for E-mail
but doesn't.  She sends and recieves maybe two or three messages a month, all
to my younger brother in Madison.  So how much should she be paying for her
two E-mails a month?

I think giving away free E-mail to people is a good thing and we shouldn't
stop.

I also think setting up a separate mail machine is no more difficult than
implementing this proposal, and is a more sensible approach to the problem.

bigger not necessarly meanng better...nether's confs are anemic...
nether is much more a service than a destination.  Grex is a
community, and its the confs that make it so...not web pages or
services.  Ihope grex getting faster doesnt change that.

(I've asked that this be linked to Agora; no response yet.)

You should ask the fw of agora.  If I were the fw of agora, though, I
would not link this item.  The whole point to having a separate coop cf
is to keep the administrivia collected in one place, so that only people
interested need see it.

There's Marcus being elitist again...the point of coop is to have a place
to discuss these things but hasnt it always been the idea that if linking
something someplace can broaden the discussion measurably, that it is a
reasonable thing to ?  For many coop items, there arent enough people who
dont read coop who really care about it, B ut I think this is a case where
plenty of folks would have oan opinoin.  If Marcus doesnt want to hear
these opinoins outside of coop, that is an elitist attitude to me.

   But Richard, anyone can join coop and participate there.  If there
is an "elitist" overtone to this discussion, its that we're using
the conference abilities of Grex, and not mass mail (or something else).
But still, anyone can take a look here to see whats going on.  If
they know about conferencing and aren't here, then they have made a
choice, and I think we should respect that by not invading other
conferences.

Really, it's all a question of what we want grex to be about.

If we want grex to be full of nothing but in your face politicking,
major dramas about the imaginary crimes of some luckless newcomer, and
imminent disater threatened or averted, then by all means, we ought to
fold co-op & agora together, and do it all in one place.  If we want
grex to be about *other* things, and we want to keep administrative
stuff down to the practical minimum, then pushing all that stuff into a
separate cf, all its own, is just exactly what we should want.

Yup.  Especially because this has gotten to be a *huge* item.  

It's still worth asking Katie if she's interested in linking the item 
over, though, Dave.  If she's not, it might be worth your while to put a 
pointer to this discussion in Agora.

Pointer would be good.

This response has been erased.

Well, the folks just reading Pets will miss it too, Richard. How about
linking everything to all conferences, so nobody will be left out?

Too late, it's linked and there are going to be a whole bunch of forgets and
pipe interrupts.

So what.  Big deal.  Katie's policy is to honor any reasonable requests for
links to agora.  I think it's a reasonable system.

I'm not taking the time to read *all* of the 76 prior responses.  I'll say
that I oppose this motion because if I had not had e-mail capabilities beyond
the confines of Grex, I never would have become a member, and I most assuredly
would have choosen a different server.  There was a time when I (as vidar)
*only* used Grex for e-mail, because I didn't see any point in using its
other capabilities.

If we got $6.00 from each E-Mail user for a year of use it would be
more than 84,000.00. Could we have a nice connection, computer and
furnature for that. Do not forget all of you would have better service 
as part of the deal.

Free BBS was tried in the seventies, a nice idea but hard to support. Get real
and make Grex a pinch more commerical. Let the newbys find another way. The
true Grexer will find the system. After all, we are everywhere.

   But Grex *has* supported itself during its six year life.  We haven't
done badly.  In fact, the staff is struggling to 'keep up' on things,
like the Sun-4/670 that the Grex populace bought.  We're doing OK.
Now, you are right that if every user paid up we'd have a lot more
money, but with a lot more money comes difficulties managing it, and
arguning over how to spend it, etc.
   Right now, Grex is this unusual place where all sorts of things
are going on, running on a budget that is fantastically small.  If
we had a budget of $84,000/yr, I'm not at all sure we wouldn't be
changed for the worse.

$84,000 wouldn't actually go very far toward paying a staff to service Grex,
if we went that way.

re: linking...why cant an item like this be linked to agora as 
*read only*, with it plainly saying that you want to post in 
this item you have to bring it up in coop.  Is it possible for 
an item to be linked as read-only in one or more confs without 
freezing it in its conf of origination?

Nope.

I know, personally, if one has to pay to get email, I would stop
sending my yearly contributions. I'd lose a lot of friends that way whom
only have email on this system. I use grex for the confrences and party,
have my mail forwarded, but alot of my friends don't pay and I'd lose
friendships that way, and quite frankly, it would suck.
Also,(I don't know if anyone mentioned it) a lot of people don't have
money to spare(give, only $6.00 a month..), some kids here are paying for
college and car payments and barely making it.
Oh well, just my .02

Re 80: That's a very important point.

My job is hotline tech support.  As a helper on grex I do similar work. 
Considering my salery and the number of calls I handle I'm worth over $6
per user question I answer.  As long as I believe grex deserves my
support, it will continue to get my cash and time donations.  If there
were enough member perks that it seemed like a business, I'd be less
likely to want to help.

Replacing the amout of time and skill I bring to grex would be really easy
compared to several people on and off staff.  I bet we could spend the entire
$84,000 to hire a replacement for just one key staff member.

        sorry, I gave up read this *new* item after #34, so I will
ask also:  In the week plus this has been discussed, has the 
newuser program been updated (zero dollars, less than two hours
donated time)?
        Has the mail machine been collected and assembled yet?  Do 
the townfolk have to mob the florist shop?

        If just outbound E-mail from those logged in thru a telnet
port (*NOT* a dial-in or any sort) is restricted, I would find that
logical.  Just send out a message, 'please use your ISP for outbound
E-mail' to those that log in from some place they DO pay money to 
get service (or get it as a company/university perk).

        I can agree that a *very good mission* of GREX (and even
M-net) is to provide an e-mail address and service to guests who
dial in.  These just may be those without an Internet Service 
Provider, the one's who would gain from sending out resume's by
e-mail and having a receving spot.  These are the one who may
not have spent $2,000 to buy a machine so they can get free e-mail,
just so the sender does not have to spend 32 cents on the delivery.
(?Do you know it takes me less time to open and close my snail-mail
box than my e-mail box??).

        Again apologies for not reading 35-84 if this problem 
was solved since 7/31/1997.

   I'm collecting parts for the mail machine now.  I still have
to enter an item in garage about it.

There are a fair number of people who telnet here from public libraries, 
university computer labs, and offices.  Many of them don't have access 
from there to any sort of e-mail.  We'd be doing some of our poorest 
"citizens" a disservice by restricting e-mail to those who dial in.

If e-mail has to be restricted in any way, I'd prefer to see it done 
universally.  

I like your suggestion in #85 *a lot*, Tim!

Re 88: what Misti just said.

When I first got on Grex, it was my only email access.  I was connecting via
an anonymous terminal login on Michnet.

At least one friend of mine, until very recently, had no email access other
than Grex, at least no private email.  It was either this or use his
parents' email account, with the obvious lack of privacy.  Hotmail and such
only work if you have a web browser, and even then Grex is more stable than
most of those services.

I think Grex provides a valuable service with its free email, and one that's
getting hard to find.  When was the last time you saw a machine with actual
shell access, that could be freely telnetted into?

I fit right in to the second paragraph of gull's response. And for me, it's
not so much a privacy issue, but that I can't get into my parents' email
without their password, which I'm not allowed to have. So then, in order to
send or recieve any email, I have to find a time when they're not busy, and
can run through and enter the password. It's a decided pain in the butt, and
I'd hate to see this proposal go through. If I become a member (which I'm
more then likely to do at some point...like when I actually have any money),
I don't want to do it knowing that I'm being motivated by whether or not I
get email.

I don't think the proposal is likely to go through, snowth. By
my count, at this point sentiment is running 3 in favor, 23
against.

I'm not ready to finalize the proposal yet.  But, interestingly enough,
estimates of how the vote will go among the members are frequently *way*
off the mark.  I've been repeatedly gulled into thinking something
will pass or fail because of posted comments, only to have the opposite
happen.  So it goes.

This response has been erased.

I'm joining this discussion kind of late, and haven't read the whole thing.
Forgive me if I'm repeating points already made, but...
There must be a better way of weeding out users who are using grex only for
free e-mail.  I'm not a member of grex, and can't really afford to be one.
I spend most of my time in the conferences, but I have several friends who
my only communication with is via e-mail.  
I agree with you that more members is a good thing, and that less of a load
on grex is a good thing, and that fewer non-participating users is a good
thing.  I just think that this proposal would inconvenience a lot of other
people as well.

Sorry for stupid questions - but how much is membership? Maybe I'll cough it
up

Thanks for asking about how to support Grex.  Although you don't have to pay
to use Grex, our users pay all the bills.  If the users don't support Grex,
it may go away.
 
The best way to support Grex is to become a member.  Members get to:
   - vote in Grex elections (if you've paid for three months or more)
   - receive the 'Wizards In Training' Manual free (again with 3 months)
   - use our Internet link (send a personal check or a copy of some ID)

Plus, you also get the warm and fuzzy feeling of having helped out a
valuable community resource.
 
Memberships cost $6/month or $60/year (US currency).  Send cash, checks,
or money orders to:

Cyberspace Communications, Inc.
P.O. Box 4432
Ann Arbor, MI 48106-4432
 
Non-membership contributions are welcome, too.  If you're interested in
making such a donation (monetary or otherwise), please send mail to aruba
for more info.   THANKS!

You can also read Agora item 15, Garima, if you want a little more info.

It has been so hard for me to get into grex as of late that I have gotten
another email address. That is in addition to sending in a three month
menbership to grex. I got another service for email and will use grex as a
confrencing bbs. Hopefully, I wouldn't have to wait a week to get back on,
as I tend to be off work at 5:00 am and it is quite busy here at that time,
or so it seems.

Thanks, moonowl!

This response has been erased.

Soo - what are some of the better ways of weeding out people who only
use us for e-mail?

I don't even agree that we want to weed out such people.

A thought:
I know a bunch of people now who are using hotmail or usa.net or some other
such email-provider.  I've never used these, but would it be possible to point
new users who just want free email in this direction?
A counter-thought:
Would we *want* to point users who just want free email in this direction?
Would the reduced load on the system be worth losing those users who start
using mail and drift into party or the conferences?

how bout quotas on mailbox size...smaller fornon-members, larger for members

Re #102: in another item I made a suggestion for bending the twig slightly,
so to speak. A lot of the discussion here has made the issue black-and-white,
but there are many intermediate options, all of which set some sort of cap
or limit on the use of e-mail by non-members. Therse are perqs for membership,
of course, but can be very weak ones, and yet could have a large impact.
For example, limit non-members to, say, 5 e-mail messages a day, or delay
transmittal of non-member e-mail to the most open free-time for the system,
or...(your turn!). 

richard (#105) slipped in, but that is another "twig bender".

Upon further consideration, I dont think such "twig benders" would work. 
 If a nonmember were limited to say, 10 email messages a day, some moron 
who doesnt like him could set up a mail spam routine to fill his quota 
and prevent him from ever getting any real email.

But also, such quotas would encourage people to set up multiple email 
addresses here so they can receive as much mail as possible.  It would 
just be confusion in all likelihood, and *lots* of bounced letters.

Unless you want to start verifying everyone and limiting people to one 
login and one login only, email caps of any kind just wont work I doubt.

Excellent point, Richard.

All in all I agree with orinoco's final point.  I think that we'd lose 
much by driving off people who originally come here for e-mail.  Some of 
them become some of most interesting conferencers.  

I prefer the idea of an e-mail watch where the largest e-mail users are 
(maybe) invited by e-mail to join the conferences.  Maybe even, since 
very large amounts of e-mail generally come from listservs, pointing out 
that we have a conference about (whatever the listserv seems to be 
about).  

Mentioning to people who ask for a lot of help with mail and don't seem 
to do anything else that there are better places to be connected *and* 
that we're primarily a conferencing system and have conferences about n 
might also be ways to go.

        If someone's full e-mail box is causing more problems than
just the volume of e-mail, why not look at a solution to the 
problem of full mail boxes?  
        Can it be rigged so that when mail comes in and discovers
no room for mail, after sooing the mail away, how about relieving
that mail box of it's oldest unread mail.  Guest or member, anyone
not tending to large mail volumes is decreasing system resources
by doing nothing, as opposed to others who actually use the system.
???

  One thing people should keep in mind when proposing technical
  "solutions" to Grex's mail load is that the measures suggested
  should ideally be less resource intensive than just handling
  the original mail.  Some of the things suggested (such as keeping
  track of how many mail messages a user has sent and limiting
  non-members to 10 messages a day would probably require at least
  as many resources as the situation they're attempting to ameliorate.

   Heh.  Not to mention that its all software that would have to
be written, taking time away from other projects.

One of the things on my list of "things to do for grex as soon as
possible" is to "timestamp" bad mail entries (& do a 500 response for
old entries, thus giving people 1 day's grace after their mailbox fills
up.)  One complication is that grex is now running a very old version of
sendmail, and there are lots of reasons why we should be upgrading.

Another thing on my list of "things to do" is to take another whack at
the telnetd queuing code.  This includes a configurable limit, remote
vs. local ip config, rlogind, & sshd.

Doing either these "right" will probably take about 1-2 weeks of
reasonably "concentrated" effort, for me.  I'd love to do it, but
unfortunately (1) I have a full-time job, and (2) I have a personal
problem looming over my head, which could take up all of my time without
notice, which was not my choice, and I absolutely detest.  In the
meantime, as much as I'd like to tackle these, I'll probably be doing
various lesser projects, that don't take as much time or can be more
conveniently dropped mid-course...

I would think some "twig benders" would be easier to write than others. The
general idea can't be dismissed until one evaluates specific suggestions.

Re #108: limiting incoming mail is one kind of twig bender, but not the one
I identified. I thought limiting outgoing e-mail - in either # messages
or their priority of being transmitted - might be a choice. Applying the
twig bender to outgoing mail does not cause the problems identified in #108.
If the twig is bent *too far* even then some users might create multiple
account for sending mail, but they are not likely to if the twig is bent only
slightly. They would be more likely to join to make life simpler.

My REAL point is that there are probably some useful tactics that could be
applied, to improve the situation. We already have tactics all over the place
so implementing tactics is not a new idea. Finding the right ones would be.

Is the idea to limit the amount of mailing that non-members do or the amount
of mailing that non-conferencers do?  Some of these ideas, such as #114, deal
with one, others, such as #109, deal with the other.  Which do we want?

  We certainly don't want to do anything which will make mail access
  depend on conference participation or we'll have a bunch of people
  bouncing around the conferences who are more concerned with upping
  their e-mail quota than they are with genuine conference participation.

Very true, Mike.  It's impossible to manage once you tell folks they 
must put a certain number of posts in the conferences to have equal 
access to e-mail.  

We'd prefer quality posts, but those are slippery and nearly impossible 
to define.  So, we'd have endless numbers of people coming into the 
conferences and posting responses that just say "Boink" or some such.

I'd really rather not mess with this at all.  I think the new mail 
machine will solve most of the problems and make many of the rest 
self-limiting.

E-mail is a way to bring people in.  It shouldnt be restricted 
idealistically.  In fact, I still think it would be a good idea to 
have POP email on the web page, or create a new self-contained 
webmail interface using the backtalk editor.  If people can do 
email via the webpage, they wont have to telnet in and the que 
loads will be lessened.

I agree with the idea that e-mail shouldn't be restricted ideologically, 
but I don't like the idea of a POP server.  

I think that would make us too attractive to people who are only looking 
for an e-mail feed and since they'd never have to visit GREX to get 
their mail, they'd have next to no likelyhood of getting more involved.

That changes e-mail from a way to bring people in to just a free service 
we provide to all comers and could quickly overrun everything else we 
want to do.  

I don't want to restrict access to e-mail at all -- but I don't mind the 
idea of GREX not being the most attractive answer to the need to be 
e-connected.  It keeps the priorities straight.

Backtalk fits beautifully into that paradigm.  Conferencing and 
communicating within our self-selected community is the main reason GREX 
exists and making that easier and more attractive is a high priortity.  

E-mail is secondary to GREX's purpose but would be an even bigger drain 
on our resources if we were "just as good as aol, but free".

(I like the way its layout invites readers to respond, too.  The feeling 
is that of "Your response belongs here."  <grin>  Great design!

/set blather=off

I see current e-mail as "just a free service we provide to all comers"
as there is no real impetus to use anything else, except for mild
appeals. The amount of interface to "grex" using e-mail is negligibly
greater than using pop mail. In fact, that is why there are so many
e-mail only users. I assert that e-mail does NOT serve to "briong people in",
except for a very few. 

My "twig bender" approach would, in fact NOT restrict access to e-mail
at all, but would make it a trifle less convenient than an e-mail only
server (I like the idea of delaying non-member e-mail to low-traffic periods,
as an initial experiment).

This idea also does not conflict with your your paradigm either. Since we
agree that grex is not the most attractive e-mail service, adjusting its
attractiveness does not create a new paradigm.

(for the record, I started using Grex for the free e-mail, and then stumbled
on the conferences.  At that point e-mail access was hard to come by for
people not affiliated with the University, so that made free e-mail a great
resource.  Now that commercial ISP accounts can be had for around $12 per
month, and there are plenty of fast free e-mail services if you're willing
to put up with ads, I'm not sure how much of a draw that service is for
Americans.  If it can draw in more people from places where e-mail is hard
to come by, cool).

I agree with mta - it is one thing not to work to reduce the mail load, and
another thing entirely to invite it to increase.

While I don't have major objections to your plan, Rane, I don't think e-mail
is a big enough problem yet to introduce a difference between members and
non-members.  It may be that at some point that will be a neessary option,
though and it won't make me as unhappy as many opf the other suggestions I've
seen.

I would hope that by having a couple of piddling distinctions between
perqs of members and nonmembers, more would join. Such minor perqs are
no different from, for example, a newsletter other organizations give
members. Most nonprofits have to offer a few perqs just to distinguish
members from nomembers, and it is recognized in law that perqs of
minor value normally come with membership in an organization (without
affecting deductibility of dues to exempt organizations). 

  And I would hope that people who feel that because they're paying
  they should be entitled to more services or that nonpaying users
  should be poked and prodded into paying would re-examine the reasons
  Grex was founded and consider that if they're really paying with
  the expectation of receiving service (as opposed to supporting a
  public-access system) then there may be more efficient ways to
  spend their money.

You are bending the twig until it breaks. Our practice of allowing telnet
only to members is a great membership builder. Consider what would happen
if we gave it away like e-mail. We are already, for complex reasons,
giving perqs to members so you can't go off the deep end like that. Yes,
limiting telnet reduces the load on our link. Limiting e-mail would also,
even if just delaying some to slack periods. It may increase membership
too. 

What are the figures that you have that show there are in fact a lot of
members who were attracted by the perk of outgoing telnet access? Do
people who are interested in outgoing telnet access commonly become
active participating members in the conferences?

Good questions all. We (and you) have often stated that if we did not
limit outgoing telnet, we would be bombed with users. I take that to be a
judgement that it is a desired feature for which, in part, members join.
Nobody "commonly become active participating members in the conferences",
but some do. Members might be more likely to. Less e-mail traffic would
improve conferencing too. All benefits of a slight bending of the e-mail
twig. Of course ISDN makes some of these things moot - but will force
upgrades of system and memory, etc., mostly for e-mail. The argument that
we can absorb enormous worldwide e-mail traffic if we only had an ISDN
link is wearing blinders. Is that why we are installing an ISDN link? Will
it really help, if people find the bottleneck in the e-mail pipeline
removed? I doubt it. 

If we allowed outbound telnet for free, we would be swamped.  Since we charge
for it, and commercial ISP accounts work so much better and don't cost much
more, I would imagine that does a lot more to stop people from using outbound
telnet from Grex than it does to encourage people to give money.  If people
are going to pay, they might as well pay for a service that works well.

Alternatively, we could conclude that we have detered a very large number
of people that would use the free outgoing telnet, leaving Grex with a
higher fraction of members than we would otherwise have. One has to look
at the leverages. Allowing non-member outbound telnet would produce many
more users than new members. Allowing non-member outbound e-mail produces
many more users than new members. We eliminate the former and we cut down
hugely on users but only a little on members. But the system is still
slow, in part, because of the e-mail load. So, cut back a *little* on
non-member e-mail, and we would cut down some on e-mail, but again only a
little on members. Except, the improved performance of the system for
*conferencing* would counteract that.  These arguments are all theory, of
course. But what do members have against experimenting with different
stratagems? Its not as though making changes is irreversible. 

 ...or just cut back ont he ptys... fewer logins would seem to tend
towards less email & other stuff.

We could also experiment with cutting off the left hand of offenders who
overflow their mailbox, or translating all the web pages on grex into
French.  Either or both might make a positive change in the system.

Making a change in itself costs resources.  (There are obviously
tremendous technical obstacles to implementing manual amputation, even
though practical working examples exist in Saudia Arabia.) If one is to
avoid just making random flailing mutations in the hopes of improving
the creature, it's desirable to have some notion of goals and priorities
("just what is better?") and to use some sort of self-consistent model
of the universe to try to make the best incremental improvements
possible ("don't march downhill to go uphill, if there's a better way to
get there.") Remember, in nature, most mutations are either neutral or
negative; and lots are rather immediately fatal.

In this case, we have plenty of evidence that many people consider
e-mail to be "pretty important".  One consistent model that explains
this is that many people here think of grex as a "destination" or
"home", instead of just a "thoroughfare" to get to other places.  In
this model, "e-mail" is an "essential" home service, along with unix
access, picospan, and all the other "standard" attributes of an account
on grex.  We even have testimonial evidence that e-mail brings some
people into the rest of grex, in particular, the conferencing, which has
already been identified as an important goal of grex.  Also, in this
model, outgoing telnet access is clearly seen as not a good use of grex.
Using this model; restricting e-mail looks bad.  It's diminishing
several core values of grex, for instance, "grex as a home" and "grex is
a place to communicate (read and write) with other people." This doesn't
prove that restricting e-mail on grex is a bad idea, of course.  But it
does suggest that, if this is an experiment we are willing to
contemplate, then we should have some good reason to discount this model
of grex.  Perhaps we aren't interested in "grex is a home", or "grex is
a way to share information with friends"; perhaps we don't like the
people here we've attracted in the past with e-mail; and clearly, we
should be willing to make changes that will definitely piss off a
distinct majority of the vocal participating conference members that
we've seen responses from right here in this item.

Has this proposal been tried on M-net?  What was the outcome there?

Lopping off hands is like lopping off twigs, a bit more brutal than the
bending I am suggesting. 

I think we like all the things you suggest we aren't interested in
(perhaps). 

Yes, people think Grex is a home for e-mail. That's what we are talking
about.  Do we want to make Grex a home primarily for somewhat low-end
e-mailing?  That sounds more like a house than a home.  If not, the thing
to do is diminish its utility and increase the utility of what we do want
Grex to be a home for.

I don't see that we have to "discount" any model of grex to make
experimental changes to test procedures that might improve the quality of
grex. A "home"  is not just a free handout. In fact, there are a lot of
users here that argue that free handouts are counterproductive. Why
doesn't that apply to Grex?  Remember, I am not suggesting going any way
at all toward a 'for profit' operation, but just suggesting that users
should participate in exchange for their benefits in the home. If they
refuse to participate...well, does that sound like a home? 

Nether.net allows outbound telnet for everyone and they have not been 
swamped.  Therefore there is reason to believe that that line of 
thinking as far as grex is concerned may be in error.

   But they have a lot more ptys than we do, too.  If we had 254 ptys
open here (the max or maybe 255) then we might be able to handle all
the load.  But we can't, so I think it is realistic to say that we're
going to be swamped.

What do other grexlike systems do in terms of e-mail?  Is grex's 'free e-mail
for all' unique or common?

Nether.net has an ethernet speed connection to the internet, unlike grex.

   Grex is nearly unique, period.   There are some few systems that offer
various things, but that I know of, Grex M-Net and Nether are some of the
open systems on the planet however.
   In terms of email, if you count the commercial freebie places Grex
doesn't really compare.  Our slow link, etc make us pale in comparison.
However, we offer many different mailers, which none of the freebie sites
do as far as I know.

different mailers - as in pine, elm, etcetera?

   Right.  There is mail, ucbmail and mh.  Someone brought over another
mailer I'd never heard of before, but I think thats gone now.
   At any rate, we have several.

four minutes after #131, #132 does an excellent description of
'what it is to be grex.'  however, if 132 comments on 131, there is
absolutely zero reason/rationale or argument 'to discount this model
of grex.'  and the metaphor of a 'home' is, quite properly, dead on.
  
every 'model' however has a 'scale.' every home has *individual* 
capacities within each component that is assembled into taht 'model
home.'
  
there are so many of these, so many of those, a bunch of other things,
this many rooms, that many toilets, some quantity of couches &/or chairs,
some extra mattresses, has or doesn't have a dishwasher / laundry / 
garbage disposal ... (the laundry might even be coin-operated!) ...
and some limit on inbound electrical capacity ........
  
so if these resources are able to be distributed on a fairly
equitable basis, on demand, except for ... uhhhhhh ... water pressure
then no one gets enough water, or pressure regardless of the fact that
every other resource is successfully distributable.
  
of courese not enough water pressure also means the toilets dont
flush too well, the shower doesn't, the laundry cant, the garbage
disposal overheats, the kitchen sink overflows with unwashed
dishes, the grass dies, flowers cant get watered, the vegetable
garden is a pipe dream and the damn cars are filthy.
  
of course the 'model house' can bed down 14,000 in the attic and
60+ live ones in teh living room, on the patio, inthe basement bar,
at a couple of dinner tables, and a whole group onthe dying lawn.
  
and then all 60+ need to use the single toilet.  oops.
  
the single toilet and the unavailable water pressure are reasonably
distributable, say, to 40+ live ones....but 60+ ? ummmmmm, something
inthe 'model house' would seem to need adjustement before the
fan is the substitute for the toilet.

I have other, faster email access.  Yet I choose to use Grex for some of  my
email.  Why?

Because Grex is stable, consistent, and will be around for a while.  My
college account will be gone in three or four years.  Grrex looks to me like
it likely will still be here.  It's a good, stable address I can get to from
anywhere.  So it's still one of my primary email boxes, and often the
address I give people to contact me at.

Yes, it's slow.  Hotmail would probably be faster.  But hotmail tends to be
unstable and easily hacked -- Grex is neither of those things.

I like the direction this item is taking! Plainly my motion in #0
is technically unworkable.  But I would indeed like to see some
"twig benders".  I don't think Grex should be a "home" for low-end
e-mailers.  As scg said in #129:

If we allowed outbound telnet for free, we would be swamped.

Right now we allow unlimited e-mail for free and we are swamped.
Let's continue looking for ways to drain the swamp.

Would it be possible to forcibly reduce the amount of processor time spent
on mail, in such a way that mail would still go through, but wouldn't be such
a resource hog and it would be more practical to get e-mail elsewhere?

As long as it applied across the board (members and non-members alike) I 
don't see a problem with that idea -- but I'm still not convinced it's 
necessary.

I think Jan's mail machine idea is the best one so far.

The mail machine idea has clearly been jumping around quite a bit, and I think
it's an excellent way of working things.  Orinoco's "rev limiter" idea might
take a little working.

This response has been erased.

My suggestion has been to slow down non-member e-mail by delaying its
processing to lower use periods. This would not affect you - in fact, it might
improve the processing of your mail.

This response has been erased.

And several others have said they favor trying it, so that's a wash. However
I recognize that if staff is against it, it can't be done. 

This response has been erased.

As a "Try Grex, they have free email" er who later became a bbs-er, even later
became a member, and well after that became an outbound telnet user, I would
like to add that I have directed a number (9-10) of local people who would
not otherwise have email to Grex.  

Especially in an affluent community like Ann Arbor, the free access to email
through Grex allows poorer people to be part of the technology loop.  Today
in Ann Arbor it is an indication of poverty and lack of technica assets to
have to say, "Sorry, I dont have an email address".  Sort of like saying,
Sorry, I dont have a phone, and there arent any public phones in my
neighborhood.  

While I am strongly in favor of MOST of Grex's resources going to
conferencing, I am just as strongly opposed to requiring payments to Grex to
use our email system.  And I would be VERY reluctant to vote for a system that
provided "lesser" access to email based on your poverty level.  

hmm...why are resources being wasted for a "staff mailing list" when there
is a "staff" conference set up for that purpose?  

Staff should set an example of how to use resources wisely...either phase
out the mailing list or kill theconf..silly to have both

The staff email list is very little staff communicating among itself.  It's
mostly people communicating with staff.  Today, for example, i got 36 email
messages on the various staff lists I'm on.  (staff, baff, postmaster,
webmaster, comment, gripe, help, etc.) and probably 6 of them were staff
communicating with itself.  It's useful for staff to communicatie sometimes
with email, because several staff members have their email forwarded to where
they work, and so have easy access to email but not easy access to
conferences.  That said, the vaste majority of staff communication comes in
the staff cf.

A lot of the email by staff to staff is also copies of responses to user
messages to staff, or similar messages, designed to keep other staffers
from thinking no one has yet dealt with a problem.  The staff conference
would not be a good solution for this kind of thing, as people would
have to exit (or suspend) mail, read the staff conference, then go back
into mail & respond to the original problem message.  It's pretty fast,
in comparison, to check whether your in box contains a response to a
particular user's message.

The staff conference normally is used for an entirely different kind of
communication, for which Picospan's usual advantages over a mailing list
are pretty impressive.  For ongoing discussions, the ability to thread
them into items & quickly view others' new responses all together is
not something to throw away.

Richard, are you eager to do all *your* communicating either by email
or via Picospan because one has to be "redundant"?  That was a truly
witless comment.

   Dave hit it on the head.  Thanks for saying #156.  Belive me folks,
when I say that a staff mailing list is needed.  If you've ever sent
mail to staff with a problem, then you've experienced why such a list
is needed.

i *thought* i had made a response in here (from agora) a couple
hours ago... not updated yet?
  
it was about the 'staff mailing list' is not a problem, it's a red herring.

This response has been erased.

possibly.. it was late/early ...

Darn it.. I posted a pop3 solution this morning, and can't find where 
the heck I posted it *sigh* I guess this is also a suitable place to ask 
and suggest....

Followed all the email debate.. Sounds all familiar.. Then.. I realize 
I'm using this pretty BackTalk and.. hmm.. Idea time:

I keep getting told by "those in the know" that the web-side is almost
load-free to a system, yes?

OK, how about a web-side interface to reach your grex email?

With all the simplistic beauty of BackTalk, I suspect a web-side 
interface would be handsome, load-light, and a damn fine asset.

Indeed, a button added to BackTalk could then provide the same "you have 
mail" known to those that suffer^H^H^H^H^H^Henjoy Picospan and Yapp.

Now, this solution becomes ever more endearing if a mail-server is also 
being run, but nothing says that it requires one.

"Yeah, but won't this promote Mail-Only Dufii?"
Could be.. But, it seems to me that coding THAT solution becomes 
somewhat easier than having to mod all the other text-based 
mail-programs. Further, this solution ALSO offers the ideal point to 
return to Daves original idea - but twisted until it cries:

    1) Shell-User Mail Restrictions:
       You _could_ restrict Pine to members, and there goes a MAJOR 
       load from the CPU.. I suspect it might also prove astonishingly
       economical to simply permit shell-guests to r/o from the shell- 
       and ONLY r/w from the webside.
    2) Mailing Lists:
       Wouldn't this be easiest handled at the stage the headers are 
       read and tested? If it's got a pile of addresses (cc'd and 
       whatnot) it could be tossed out, but...
       A) Why not keep exactly ONE COPY around and merely pass the 
          users a pointer to some file? Thus, all the mailing lists get
          jammed into a single location - even if in different files?

Anyway, nuf for the mmoment..

Um, no.  Web hosting is not "load free".  Backtalk, for example, is probably
three or four times as demanding of system resources as Picospan is.  I've
done a little work building web-email interfaces.  The one I've been debugging
for a client is probably three or four times more demanding of system
resources than "pine" is.  I think I could do better than that, but it would
be a moderately challenging project.  Building something as quick as "mailx"
would be a quite hard.

If we offered a POP client, then I'd have no problem with also offering a
web-mail interface.  Six of one, half dozen of the other.

I do have serious doubts if we want to go in this direction at all though.

I agree.  A web interface, IMHO, is just as bad as a POP interface.  Worse,
even, because it's more load intensive.  Besides, if you want free Web email,
go to hotmail, yes?

well, they have the "free" email anyway <shrug> 
 
I was looking for size/speed alternatives.. I already KNOW pop3
isn't too bad, once we got my patch slapped in, anyway.

You have several choices:

• Go to the menu of items for the Coop10 conference
• Go to the list of conferences
• Go to the opening screen