On Mon, 4 Jan 1999, Bob Nielsen wrote:
> Joop, I see from the headers that your message took approximately one day
> to arrive and went from vger.rutgers to listserv.funet.fi to my ISP (??).
>
> Why would something from the list be routed via funet?
A lot of traffic from vger is routed via "exploder" hosts, like funet's
mail server. vger's zmailer has been configured to punt a list of
top-level domains to funet (one message transferred only, but with a HUGE
recipient list), funet then makes the millions of connections to the
recipient's mail servers. This is done just because vger isn't really up
to the job, it's a tiny sparc classic box... mostly comparable with a 486.
This also distributes the cost of the bandwidth needed to transfer the
list traffic (from whoever pays rutger univ's line, to the finnish
government & taxpayers 8-). There are other exploder hosts for other TLD's
too.
- Hessu
