🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <davecb.725923251@yorku.ca> davecb@nexus.yorku.ca (David Collier-Brown) writes:
>  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.

That statement should have been posted to rec.humor, not to a comp group.

You send mail to a user at host B.  Host B doesn't recognize its own
name, and thinks it must relay it.  It accepts the mail for forwarding
to its relay.  At this stage it disconnects, and you have your "positive
handoff" acknowledgement.  Now host B tries to send to its relay.  I
discovers that the relay doesn't exist.  It tries to bounce the message.
The bounce is sent to the relay.  But the relay doesn't exist, so the
bounce also fails.

This type of situation is quite common.  Newly installed machines just
out of the box often behave this way, and inexperienced administrators
may not notice the problem for several months.