🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <davecb.725910818@yorku.ca> davecb@nexus.yorku.ca (David Collier-Brown) writes:
|>Short answer: 
|>	Go read RFC821/2 (and consider yourself insulted).

stanley@skyking.OCE.ORST.EDU (John Stanley) writes:
|You had better expand on that answer, for neither RFC appears to claim
|anything opposite to what I wrote. And, since both RFC's deal only with
|Internet standards, and since electronic mail can cross network
|boundaries to systems which have no requirement to use SMTP (much less
|obey Internet RFC's), neither can speak definitively on what I wrote.

|>Long answer:

|>	Mail is a reliable, end-to-end service, and must 

|Thanks for the laugh. You may think that mail is reliable, but that
|don't make it so. RFC 822 makes no mention of "reliable", and RFC 821
|mentions it in two instances, one of which specifies the use of a
|"reliable transport" mechanism. 

  Your mail may be unreliable, but mine isn't: mine uses SMTP, which
defines, as I already pointed out, a positive acknowlegement scheme
FROM THE SENDING HOST TO THE RECIEVING HOST.  If the mail doesn't 
get there, I know about it because I'm doing end-to-end positive handoffs.
If I'm talking to a proxy (gateway) site, I get a 250 OK from the proxy,
and at that point it becomes that sites's responsability to do the same
with any further sites it contacts.  If it gets a negative acknowlegement,
it's its responsability to send me mail saying it didn't get through.
And that responsability is passed on to each intermediate site in turn.
Unless you use proprietary PC mailers, your mail uses RFC822 as a
format standard, and SMTP, BSMTP or UUCP as a transport.  SMTP and BSMTP
do exacly the above, and known UUCP mailers do the same.

  And the number of **formally unreliable** mailers can be counted 
on the fingers of a one-fingered man's hand.  Alas, he's growing more
fingers as we speak, due to the existance of erroniously specificed and 
designed PC mail programs.

if skyking.OCE.ORST.EDU is losing mail, you should speak to your
postmaster: you're on the internet too. 


--dave (all the world's not a vax, but
	Usenet, BITnet and the Internet ain't trivial) c-b
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | davecb@CCS.YorkU.CA | lethe!dave
72 Abitibi Ave.,      | 
Willowdale, Ontario,  | York Postmaster and
CANADA. 416-223-8968  | occasional sendfail(8) consultant.