Re: List administration

[Chris Thompson <cet1@cus.cam.ac.uk>]

<delurk>

gjb@gbch.net (Greg Black) writes:
> 
> On 2003-12-03, Dean Anderson wrote:
[...]
> > He said he was altering the operations of his mail servers to delete mail
> > that wasn't delivered in one hour.  This is unreasonable, regardless of
> > what Verizon does.
> 
> Yes, it utterly unreasonable.  Things go wrong in the real
> world:  power utilities have disasters; fires, floods and solar
> flares cause problems; computer hardware loses its magic smoke.
> Many people have stopped using backup MX hosts, as these just
> seem to collect extra spam.
> 
> Because of all these factors, mailing lists should be prepared
> to queue mail to subscribers for at least a few days. 

Make that "mail servers in general" rather than just mailing lists,
and I have to agree, no argument. Locally the angels-on-a-pin contention 
has traditionally been whether 4 days or 5 days is the "right" timeout.

However, I can certainly sympathise with Randy about the highly
antisocial behaviour of servers that use 4xx codes unnecessarily to 
[not] reject suspected spam. We haven't heard his side of this yet, 
but often the right way to penalise such servers is not to shorten
the ultimate timeout, but to decrease the retry rate for transmission
attempts.

</delurk>

Chris Thompson
Email: cet1@cam.ac.uk

--
to unsubscribe send a message to namedroppers-request@ops.ietf.org with
the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body.
archive: <http://ops.ietf.org/lists/namedroppers/>