In order to give more concrete arguments in favour of registering local or national gateways in DOMAIN NAMES, Glenn Malling and I have been making a simple test with the Novell list at SUVM (about 1200 recipients). We have subscribed an account on a machine which does not have a local/national gateway registered but instead relies on the INTERBIT service under its BITNET address, its regular Internet address, and a %-routed Internet address which simulates what would have happened if the host had registered a local gateway. That is, we have made a comparison of delivery time between: 1. BITNET all the way (using DISTRIBUTE). 2. Internet all the way (DISTRIBUTE not used - "bandwidth is plentiful"). 3. BITNET to the local/national gateway (using DISTRIBUTE), then SMTP for the final delivery. The test was made both with a mainframe at Penn State University, which has excellent connectivity and availability, and a mainframe in Poland, with 32k connectivity to Stockholm and 64k to Wien. Poland is an interesting case because it is by far the best connected eastern country; that is, if any eastern country can afford not to use DISTRIBUTE, it is Poland. The test was made on a working day (tuesday - monday was a holiday in the US) and mostly during working hours (the polish test had to extend during the evening so that we could get figures we can compare). It is not possible to easily calculate the exact delivery time as the various clocks on the way are not synchronized and the error was on the order of the BITNET delivery time. Instead, the difference between the arrival time of the first file in the "triplet" and that of the other 2 files was calculated, and then an average was calculated. That is, the figures show the extra delay as compared to the fastest delivery method. +----------+-----------------------+ | Delivery | Extra delay | | method | Penn State Poland | +----------+------------+----------+ | BITNET | Fastest | Fastest | | Mixed | 42 min 41 | 1 h 45 | | Internet | 3h 7 min | 3 h 20 | +----------+------------+----------+ BITNET delivery for is on the order of 10-15 minutes from the 'Date:' stamp in the message to the arrival time, about 5 minutes more for Poland. Note that in the case of Poland it was not possible to reliably emulate mixed delivery: the so-called "local" gateway that was used was in fact in the US, but the message had the advantage of not being batched with hundreds of other recipients (many of them MX'ed) which flooded the name servers. Finally, these figures only apply to high-volume mailing lists. The delays are partly due to the continuous flow of messages (about 100-150 a day). The notebooks are available if people want to double-check my observations, this was a 30 minutes programming project. Anyway I hope this will convince Poland and Italy to define a national gateway in BITEARN NODES. Eric