🚀 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, 

Your mail travels via SMTP from originator to recipient? All the time?
The entire path?  You have proof of this, I assume. Or are you making
it up as you go along?

>If the mail doesn't 
>get there, I know about it because I'm doing end-to-end positive handoffs.

You may think you are from your misreading of the RFC's (and misapplying
them to systems they don't apply to), but you have no guarantee of this.
You have no control over the mail software that your mail passes through
once it leaves your site.

Even should this be true, here is a very real instance of mail being
sent and nothing being received as an error:

	I send mail to a system that is down. 

	Three days go by...

	The far end sends an error. 

	In the intervening three
	days, however, the disk controller of my mailhost lets the
	smoke out of one of the smoke containers. Being Christmas Eve,
	it isn't fixed for four days.

	Did the mail I sent get through? No.
	Did I get an error response? No.
	Has this ever happened? Yes.
	Do I treat mail as being reliable? Ha. Ha.

>Unless you use proprietary PC mailers, your mail uses RFC822 as a
>format standard, 

Really? There are NO other networks than the PC ones that pay no
attention to RFC822? You must not get out much. 

>  And the number of **formally unreliable** mailers can be counted 

There is a considerable difference between "formal" unreliability and
real world behaviour. Or are you unfamiliar with the term "bug"?

>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.

You seem to have some strange idea that mail never failed to get through
before PC's were invented. You would gain a much broader view of the
world if you would remove these blinders.

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

I know you meant it as a red herring, trying to deflect the discussion
from your ridiculous claims about mail reliability, by it is rather
telling. If you really thought that mail was "reliable" then how could
skyking be losing it? Your accusation that skyking is losing mail is in
reality the admission that mail is NOT reliable.