I have put in a request to our USENET admin to gate HOCKEY-L into our
USENET feed here at RPI, making it part of the "rpi.mail.*" branch.
Most of the users here who are subscribed have both Email AND Usenet
access, and it is just a sheer waste of resources to have multiple copies
of each message going to everyone, especially when 30-50 messages a day
are coming in.
 
Gating into USENET has two main advantages:
 
1. Only one copy of each posting is stored.  Users run the newsreader
   program, and read the articles.  If they want to save certain messages,
   that ability is present.  This lightens up the load on our mail server
   machine, and keeps the spool directories down in size too.
 
2. Users can "pick and choose" subjects of interest easily, using either
   the "trn" or "nn" newsreaders, which are available on all of our
   workstations and AIX/370.  The newsreaders are much nicer to use than
   the typical UCB Mail program, which most subscribers use here to read
   their mail.
 
Once the group is created, local RPI users should not completely
unsubscribe from HOCKEY-L, since your name wouldn't be part of the list.
But setting the NOMAIL option would stop HOCKEY-L mail from coming to
your mailbox once the rpi.mail.hockey-l group is receiving mail.  This
method definitely works, as last year a bunch of users here got our
admin to take the high-volume BISEXU-L list and gate it into USENET.  I
don't foresee any problems with doing the same for HOCKEY-L.  I'll post
the result of my request once our USENET admin gets back to me.
 
---
Kenny Zalewski -- Information Technology Services at Rensselaer
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 83 Albright Court, Troy, NY, 12180
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