OSEC

Neohapsis is currently accepting applications for employment. For more information, please visit our website www.neohapsis.com or email hr@neohapsis.com
 
Subject: Re: Incessant Bounces
From: Brad Knowles (blkskynet.be)
Date: Thu Aug 24 2000 - 01:53:20 CDT

At 6:10 PM -0400 2000/8/23, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> Then your mailer is BROKEN! My mailers (and I include both instances of
> Postfix as well as other mailers that I administer) do not ever lose
> mail in this case. Not *EVER*.

        Perhaps from the perspective of the RFCs, bounced mail is not
lost mail. However, you have to bounce the bounces with a null
envelope sender, otherwise you will get a loop. And if the double
bounce fails, the result just gets thrown away -- the mail is never
received, the bounce is never received, and the sender never finds
out what happened.

        However, I can tell you from personal experience that from the
perspective of the users, unnecessarily bounced mail *is* lost as far
as they are concerned, and in this matter, their opinion is the only
one that counts.

        I can't fix their mail server to generate warnings when messages
aren't received within a millisecond of being transmitted, but I can
at least set up our mail servers so that we give the best chance
possible for a transmitted mail message to be received by our
customers.

        If I wasn't going to do that, we might as well turn down our
queue holding time to ten minutes, and bounce everything that can't
be delivered within that window -- since by your rules a bounced
message is not a lost message, this would be okay. 

--
   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

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.