🚀 go-pugleaf

stanley@skyking.OCE.ORST.EDU (John Stanley) writes:
|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.

  I tend to assume a normal operations secedule of backups when I
discuss mailhubs.  Yes, other things can interfere with mail.  In my
case, a Dash-10 can drop through the roof of my building (I'm under a
landing slope, see) and take out everything.
  However, I'm discussing mail, not acts of god.  Problems outside
the mail system and/or protocol get dealt with by solutions outside
the system and/or protocol.

  My operator restores the backup that cron took, and the mailer
delivers the bounce message. Several days late.

  By the way, we run a 7-day expirey period, just to deal with probabalistic
latency problems like that.

--dave

-- 
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.