The way most people keep up to date on network news is
through subscription to a number of mail reflectors. Mail
reflectors are special electronic mailboxes which, when they
receive a message, resend it to a list of other mailboxes.
This in effect creates a discussion group on a particular
topic. Each subscriber sees all the mail forwarded by the
reflector, and if one wants to put his "two cents" in sends
a message with the comments to the reflector....
The general format to subscribe to a mail list is to find
the address reflector and append the string -REQUEST to the
mailbox name (not the host name). For example, if you
wanted to take part in the mailing list for NSFnet reflected
by NSFNET@NNSC.NSF.NET, one sends a request to
-5-
NSFNET-REQUEST@NNSC.NSF.NET. This may be a wonderful scheme,
but the problem is that you must know the list exists in the
first place. It is suggested that, if you are interested,
you read the mail from one list (like NSFNET) and you will
probably become familiar with the existence of others.
A registration service for mail reflectors is provided by
the NIC in the files NETINFO:INTEREST-GROUPS-1.TXT,
NETINFO:INTEREST-GROUPS-2.TXT, and NETINFO:INTEREST-GROUPS-
3.TXT.
The NSFNET mail reflector is targeted at those people who
have a day to day interest in the news of the NSFnet (the
backbone, regional network, and Internet inter-connection
site workers). The messages are reflected by a central
location and are sent as separate messages to each subscriber.
This creates hundreds of messages on the wide area networks
where bandwidth is the scarcest.
There are two ways in which a campus could spread the news
and not cause these messages to inundate the wide area
networks. One is to re-reflect the message on the campus.
That is, set up a reflector on a local machine which forwards
the message to a campus distribution list. The other is
to create an alias on a campus machine which places the
messages into a notesfile on the topic. Campus users who
want the information could access the notesfile and see the
messages that have been sent since their last access. One
might also elect to have the campus wide area network
liaison screen the messages in either case and only forward
those which are considered of merit. Either of these
schemes allows one message to be sent to the campus, while
allowing wide distribution within.