Yes, connectivity issues could be a problem.  I would assume that, at a minimum, you'd have to know the email address of the person responsible for the area router.  And Johnny's...

Regarding the email itself, what could happen is that the Internet email gateway could forward the email to an alias on whatever machine was doing the DECnet forwarding.

To take the only example that I can remember well, the Tops-20-Wizards mailing list on SU-SCORE had a large list of subscribers.  One such member was Tops-20-Wizards@CU20B.COLUMBIA.EDU.#Internet.  Entries in that list (on CU20B) had some members like GG@CUCHEM.#DECnet, which was the system administrator on Columbia's Chemistry department's VAX, at the time which did not have either TCP/IP or SMTP.  CU20B (and any 20) can convert to and from VAXmail format. I think it's actually called MAIL11.

It's completely unremarkable, doable and it handled a rather large amount of traffic without a lot of tinkering.  One nice thing about DECnet based SMTP/MAIL11 transport could be that your chances of getting spammed on HECnet are probably a lot lower.

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On 1/24/22 2:11 PM, Mark J. Blair wrote:

Is there any precedent for subscribing to the mailing list with a HECnet mail gateway address, and reading the traffic under VMS MAIL? One of the downsides would be loss of access to the list exactly when asking for HECnet debugging help, of course.