-> Like BitNet, MCINet, SprintNet, ArpaNet and dozens of others.  Fido
-> gated to the Usenet; and there was at least one, if not more formal d
-> e-mail gateways.  My e-mail address used to be something like:
->
-> bill_cheek@f731.n201.fidonet.org
->
-> Now there is no net-wide gateway for anything.  There are some local
-> nets who
-> port their mail in and out....but not all nor even most do it anymore
And the REASON there's no Net-wide gate is because the Internet is NO
controlled.  Someone who had been booted from FidoNet used several
accounts to anonymusly subscribe about 200 FIdoNet sysops to several
thousand mailing lists.  Do you have any idea what they DOES to a Gate?
Because of the agreement all Gates had to agree to with Burt Juda, they
could NOT bounce the messages, they HAD to deliver them, even if the
sysop BEGGED them not to.  More than a few systems dropped out of Fido
because of that.
Most of the people involved could NOT unsubscribe by themselves, because
the subscribe messages came fro a different system.  It took several
months to get the last list-owners to cut the mail, and in more than a
few cases, the lists moved from unsecured servers to different ISs who
provided some measure of security.  today, the vast majority of lists
require a confirmation of subscriptions, because of that event.
So the Internet took a page from FidoNet, in regard to security.
But that in NO way makes FidoNet anything like SprintNet (simply a
dedicated section of Sprint's LD trunk lines), or ARPANet (a subsection
of the Internet with VERY high security, or any of the rest you
mentioned.
--- Platinum Xpress/386/Wildcat! v1.3
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