🚀 go-pugleaf

[ Dropping non-Demon groups immediately - clearly not relevant to
non-Demon users. ]

In article <01bba718$a1da1ba0$5a2e989e@enville.demon.co.uk>,
John Risby <john@enville.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>CheckMail is an advanced finger client with the following features:-
>
>* Timed finger of Demon's POST server (i.e. xxxxxxxx@post.demon.co.uk)
>
>  CheckMail can be configured to automatically connect to the post 
>  server at regular intervals of between 1 minute and 1 hour.

This seems to be a typical example of the type of product that provides
a benefit for an individual user, but could seriously exacerbate the
problem that probably motivated it, if it gains any real level of
market penetration.

I would suggest, from a system point of view, that the minimum poll 
interval should be at least 10 minutes and probably 15, and that there
should be an initial delay of at least 5 minutes.  The ideas of these 
figures is so that the program won't kick in under normal conditions and
will then add mimimal extra load to the punts.  Unfortunately, the 
nature of markets is that, without regulation, products are designed
for the individual, not the system.

The uses I can see for this are:

- sticky punt syndrome - it seems to me that one of the main factors in this
  is likely to overloading of the punts, so anything that adds to the load
  is likely to make things worse;

- determining when to drop the connection on a mail only poll - Demon's style
  of mail feeding isn't particularly well suited to this sort of use, and
  if you still want to use it, you are still going to have to watch the
  connection, which in a commercial context is likely to a lot more expensive
  than the phone time saved compared with an automated, but conservative
  strategy (caution: Demon have said they won't accept responsibility for 
  runaway automated sessions);

- diagnosing incoming mail bombs, etc. - this is a one shot operation.
-- 
David Woolley, London, England          david@djwhome.demon.co.uk
(Sending any email to this site constitutes a licence to copy it to any
company which might reasonably be assumed to have transported it or
might reasonably be assumed to service any addresses quoted in it. 15Sep1996)