Subject: Re: [Ieprep] We have been asked to review these drafts

From: Ian Brown <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 11:50:44 +0100

Fred said:
>Per our illustrious Area Director,speaking in "sipping", we need to
>come up with requirements that drafts of this type would address.  The
>requirements should not be of the form "someone has decided that this
>should be done in their private network", but rather "there is a strong
>technical need for this to be done in any IP network, for specific
>reasons demonstrated by user practice or simulation results."
>
>  "SMTP Service Extension for Priority", J. Onions, G. Lunt, 05/30/2001,
>  <draft-onions-priority-smtpext-00.txt>

I have some comments on this draft, but I'll save them until people with
more SMTP server operational experience than I have comment on whether they
think a priority ESMTP option would be useful... I can see that it might be
useful in allowing the following types of behaviour:

* Deliver prioritised messages before "normal" messages (but do SMTP servers
ever build up significant queues of messages?)

* Retry delivery of prioritised messages more often than normal messages if
the first attempt fails

* Refuse to accept prioritised messages from users if the resources aren't
available to do priority delivery?

What do people think?

Ian.

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From: Ken Carlberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2002 12:46:12 +0100

> ever build up significant queues of messages?)

its quite dependent on the configuration & deployment at a given site,
but for large enterprise networks, yes, on occasion they do tend to 
suffer from these build ups.  

viruses like Melissa are the usual culprits that folks blame when 
thinking about the topic, but some of the larger businesses also ask 
their employees to not (re)distribute the animated email christmas 
cards because of the culmulative buffer space they consume and the 
ripple effect they generate in slowing down delivery of regular business 
email.

-ken

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From: Scott Keagy <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 2002 11:14:38 -0700

comment on email queues in-line....

>ever build up significant queues of messages?)

Depends on how the mail administrator configures the network. For example 
"sendmail -bd -q30m" will cause the mail server to queue mail for 30 
minutes before sending (at least that's what I distantly remember from my 
mailserver days). In this case, would need a separate queue for prioritized 
messages (and maybe a command-line option to specify the priority queue 
processing interval).

Other consideration: will Blackberry and other 2-way pagers latch onto this 
for better performance of email messages, at the risk of emergency traffic? 
If so, will need do distinguish emergency messages versus normal messages 
requesting low latency.

Regards,
Scott