Subject: Re: List administration

From: Chris Thompson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 14:01:28 +0000 (GMT)

<delurk>

[email-masked] (Greg Black) writes:
> 
> On 2003-12-03, Dean Anderson wrote:
[...]
> > He said he was altering the operations of his mail servers to delete mail
> > that wasn't delivered in one hour.  This is unreasonable, regardless of
> > what Verizon does.
> 
> Yes, it utterly unreasonable.  Things go wrong in the real
> world:  power utilities have disasters; fires, floods and solar
> flares cause problems; computer hardware loses its magic smoke.
> Many people have stopped using backup MX hosts, as these just
> seem to collect extra spam.
> 
> Because of all these factors, mailing lists should be prepared
> to queue mail to subscribers for at least a few days. 

Make that "mail servers in general" rather than just mailing lists,
and I have to agree, no argument. Locally the angels-on-a-pin contention 
has traditionally been whether 4 days or 5 days is the "right" timeout.

However, I can certainly sympathise with Randy about the highly
antisocial behaviour of servers that use 4xx codes unnecessarily to 
[not] reject suspected spam. We haven't heard his side of this yet, 
but often the right way to penalise such servers is not to shorten
the ultimate timeout, but to decrease the retry rate for transmission
attempts.

</delurk>

Chris Thompson
Email: [email-masked]

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---

From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: 7 Dec 2003 08:59:34 -0000

> Make that "mail servers in general" rather than just mailing lists,

Yup. RFC 1123 says ``the give-up time generally needs to be at least 4-5
days.'' RFC 2821 says the same thing.

I used a 7-day timeout in qmail, and I'm glad I did. A few months ago,
large chunks of the Internet were unreachable for several days straight;
naive 4-day timeouts led to widespread delivery failures.

Randy's 1-hour timeout is absurd.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago