On Mon, 23 Jan 1995 10:16:29 PST you said: >Stanford's MVS mainframe acts as a gateway between Bitnet and systems in >the local STANFORD.EDU Internet domain. Much of the mail traffic handled >by this gateway originates from Bitnet systems which appear to have their >own direct Internet connection, but which are configured use Bitnet >rather than the Internet when transmitting mail to STANFORD.EDU hosts. > This is my own personal interpretation of what is happening... Others might fill in the facts... Here is the entry from the DOMAIN NAMES file: :nick.STANFORD.EDU :mailer.MAILER@STANFORD BSMTP 3 :site.Stanford University LAN :gatemast.GG.JWS@STANFORD :interconnect.MX This says that mail for any subdomain or for STANFORD.EDU can be routed via BITNET to MAILER@STANFORD over BITNET. If you remove that you'd probably get more mail through SMTP. But you might also want to run a LISTSERV (L-Soft) TCP/IP server then and cover the domain that way to help make better use of the nets. Right now the reason you get individual mail from BITNET is because the closest backbone LISTSERV server is at UCBCMSA so mail has to be sent from there (if I'm reading the tables right). Without the optimization of delivery and the aggregation that LISTSERV provides the BITNET core would probably have melted years ago. A lot of the traffic is list traffic. Marty