Billing

Some components of the electronic mail service may have billing requirements. Examples may include:

• the long distance calls incurred by fax gateways
• the paper and handling costs of campus mail gateways
• the traffic-based charges of commercial X.400 service gateways
• the traffic-based charges incurred by pager gateways

Other charges, such as disk resource and connect time charges related to utilizing the electronic mail service itself, have been determined to be undesirable, but may be deemed to be necessary, regardless.

In keeping with the strategy of minimizing staff requirements, these billing operations should be highly automated, and submitted to the responsible local electronic mail administrator either via electronic mail or via the administrative service agent. Manual intervention must be minimized in order to handle the potential billing load.