Planned Artemis RIME Gateway

Jim Nobles

RIME is a whole different animal than Fido. All the messages (in every conference or echo) go to one main RIME BBS and then are sent out from there back to all the RIME nodes. It's very Big Brotherish in nature but it's useful because a lot of filtering is done (most were designed from the beginning to be "family oriented" and a lot of crude material is deleted before it reaches the nodes back down the line). Most of the filtering (obscentity blocking) is done at the sender's home node before the message ever leaves. Of course, this is not the only way to run a net.

RIME's organization causes its Internet email conference to work like this: One of the 400 or so RIME channels (conference) is named EMAIL. You enter that conference on your RIME BBS and type in an email message to send to someone on the Internet. The first line of the TEXT of your message must be:

TO: their.name@whereever.they.are

Then when that BBS does its daily (or twice daily) mail run, all the new mail in all the RIME conferences (including the messages in the EMAIL channel) begin their journey to the main RIME BBS in Maryland. How long this takes is determined by how many hubs all the messages get routed through before reaching the Main RIME board. Once they arrive there the TO: line in the text of the message is deciphered and the message is routed on to the internet addressed to the person listed.

There are some obvious disadvantages: This whole thing can be very slow. Depending on how may hubs your message is routed through, it may take 5 or 6 DAYS for it to reach the internet. The hub also makes two mail runs a day. It calls the Main board at 3:00 a.m.and gets all the new mail. The local server calls the hub at 4:00 a.m., gets the new mail and deposits the outgoing mail. At 5:00 a.m. the hub calls the Main board again and hands off all the new outgoing mail. Most RIME BBSs aren't so direct, however.

One major advantage - the cost is zero. The BBS doesn't have to be hooked up to the Internet or contracted for a service. This is fortunate since most wouldn't be able to justify the cost while running a free BBS (as many of them are).

The idea for bringing Artemis to WaterShip is very simple. One would subscribe to (probably) the Artemis Digest for starters, using an email address on WaterShip. The Digest will then be made into a public bulletin. Anyone wishing to send to the Artemis-List can edit their reply and send it on the EMAIL channel. Of course, it needs to be made perfectly clear that any parts of the Digest not directly related to the reply must be edited out when quoting.