On Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:32:36 +0100
Matus UHLAR - fantomas via Postfix-users <[email protected]>
wrote:

> When the first return failures - but when the first address is unreachable, 
> it takes a while to timeout, which will users consider "slow" and will 
> complain about that.

That depends on the client.
 
> Btw, which IMAP/SMTP client will retry another IP if one returns failure?

All of them should. Personally I only tested Sylpheed MUA. I used it
for years and quite like its lightweight design.

I have imap.example.com record that points to 2 IP addresses. I powered
off 10.0.5.52 to test failure modes:

$ dig imap.example.com +short
10.0.5.51
10.0.5.52

$ ping -c 1 10.0.5.51
PING 10.0.5.51 (10.0.5.51) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.0.5.51: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=0.355 ms

$ ping -c 1 10.0.5.52
PING 10.0.5.52 (10.0.5.52) 56(84) bytes of data.
>From 10.0.0.6 icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable

When Sylpheed is connecting to imap.example.com and the powered off
host (10.0.5.52) happens to be the first IP address returned by DNS
resolver, I only notice a 5 second wait. There are no error messages
about the unreachable hosts. This is how all good clients should behave.
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