Why are so many taxacom messages so long ?

[Robert Robbins]

On Sat, 18 Sep 1993, Ricardo Crust wrote:

> This is a big issue among email users in Africa.  Every single byte
> which is sent or received has to be paid for - either by an academic
> computer service or out of our research budget.  At many African
> universities and institutes, researchers cannot subscribe to email
> listservers because they dare not risk the unpredictable costs.
>
> Do other taxacom subscribers have this problem ?

At all universities in the United States with which I am familiar, all
incoming mail is received without any per-byte charges.  Some universities
are charging a fixed monthly fee for internet connections and others are
charging or considering charging some kind of per-byte fee on outgoing
mail.  The logic for not charging on incoming is justto avoid the kinds of
problems described in the posting -- the totally unpredictable nature of
incoming volume and the inherent unfairness in charging for it.