17 April 1995 Ottawa
 
I have not found the big service providers to be a problem.  Anytime my
list has been spammed from one of them I have found firms like Delphi
and aol pretty responsive to my complaint that the message is off topic
and especially if it was sent to 197 lists and newsgroups.
 
In general, I have also found postmistresses and postmasters at sites
generally to be quite responsive to pleas for them to crank down the
message level as I frankly do not care if my subscriber has read,
replied to, forwarded or discarded the mail my list sent them or if the
mail is delayed by one, two or four hours.
 
Some have thanked me for telling them about things they were not aware
of and one even responded to my question as to whether their softwre
could send me hourly stats on their staff who were logged on and
strongly desiring a conjugal relationship with a football team or the
cheerleaders or both.
 
Some systems have critical internal mail to handle and must set their
error notification schedule morre frequent than I like but that is life.
 
If I can help a postmaster make his software vendor repair or replace
software not working to rfc spec, I will.  e.g. sending delay or error
notices to the reply-to: field and not to the sender: address.
 
The problem I find is service providers who treat their gateways to
Internet as a nusiance and are primarily intersted in their site or
network's internal message traffic and do not repair broken gateways or
take long vacations with no one else at the site able to repair anything
until the postmaster gets back from Timbuktu.
 
However, in general, I believe the overworked gatemasters, postmasters
and their helpers are doing an excellent job to make the net a nice
place for all.