Diagnosing Delivery Problems in the White House Information-Distribution System

As part of a collaboration with the White House Office of Media Affairs, members of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed a system, called COMLINK, that distributes a daily stream of documents released by the Office of Media Affairs. Approximately 4,000 direct subscribers receive information from this service, but more than 100,000 people receive the information through redistribution channels. The information is distributed through e-mail and the World Wide Web. These invalid subscriptions cause a backwash of hundreds of bounced-mail messages each day that must be processed by the operators of the COMLINK system.