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Subject: Re: Incessant Bounces
From: Brad Knowles (blkskynet.be)
Date: Thu Aug 24 2000 - 01:47:40 CDT

At 2:17 PM -0700 2000/8/23, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:

> Brad is right, of course, but only in the sense that it is not generally
> possible to prove a negative.

        Not without some out-of-band method that allows you to
independantly verify the negative results. The whole mathematical
area of Statistics is based on this fact.

> Brad?
>
> I realize that you don't have access to any old AOL mail server logs any-
> more, but if there is any concrete evidence you can put forward of such
> things occuring, I'm sure that would be enlightening for all of us. (Well,
> for me anyway.)

        Sorry, guy. I don't have access to those servers any more, and I
don't have archives of those mailboxes so that I could show you the
previous data that could potentially have proved this claim. Nor do
I have access anymore to an AOL-scale "test" mail system where I
could break mail for millions of simulated customers, so that I could
make a serious attempt to regenerate the same sorts of errors with
more modern software, OSes, hardware, etc....

        You just have to take my word for it that this is what I saw, and
that the results were really, really bad.

        Of course, everyone on the list (and everyone else in the world,
for that matter) is perfectly welcome to set their mail servers up so
that they generate 5xx response codes when they get an NXDOMAIN
response, and we can see how long it takes to generate similar
problems distributed across a wider set of systems, OSes, hardware
platforms, etc....

        However, I prefer to be more conservative with the mail for our
customers (that's what I'm getting paid for, after all), and will
elect to stay out of this test -- I have production mail servers,
with real mail to be processed, and don't want to take any
unnecessary risks. 

--
   These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy
======================================================================
Brad Knowles, <blkskynet.be>                || Belgacom Skynet SA/NV
Systems Architect, Mail/News/FTP/Proxy Admin || Rue Colonel Bourg, 124
Phone/Fax: +32-2-706.13.11/12.49             || B-1140 Brussels
http://www.skynet.be                         || Belgium

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