1 April 1995 Ottawa
 
I had to delete a couple of users from blind-l in Venezuela due to non
delivery.  Problem was I was getting the message connection timed out or
no such host.
 
Not sure what the solution is, as it appears to be a physical network
problem.  If the subscriber wants the mail bad enough they could arrange
for an account in the U.S. or some country with reliable network access
and call in at their expense for the mail, another alternative is have
themreceive archives of the mail on a diskette.
 
Of course someone has to physically mail the disks.
 
You may wish to contact the postmaster at the site your subscriber is at
and ask what their network problem seems to be and also the postmster at
the site that is receiving the message and unable to deliver it.  I can
see transient network failures occurring but the other site being
unreachable for 5 days or more at a time is serious network trouble.
 
You could also try looking for a better link to the destination site and
try to somehow manually force-route it that way.  Back in my bitnet days
i could cut a week off mail delivery by selecting a good but not very
busy gateway.
 
The problem of a subscriber who genuinely wants to interact with a
mailing list but has network trouble is for real and the solution of
deleting the person from the list for the sanity of the listowner is not
too good for the subscriber but keeping them on can flood out the list
owner with error reports.
Brian Lingard
Internet [log in to unmask]