At 4/24/2000 04:17 PM -0400, Adam McKenna wrote or quoted:
>Your apparent standpoint in this conversation, up until this paragraph, was
>that qmail (or internet mail in general) is lacking some feature that you
>want implemented:
>[snip]
>You've been answered with (for the most part) "We think things are OK the
>way they are, use queuelifetime if you want to change qmail's behavior"
As a contrasting view, I see things roughly thus:
As things stand with qmail right now, a user sending mail through qmail
gets one of three things:
1) A successful delivery.
2) A bounce message (liable to happen within a few minutes under most
circumstances).
3) An eventual failure (which takes queuelifetime).
In the case of a failure to deliver, the user will not get *any* warning
about it until queuelifetime has passed. I think that the option to have
qmail (or a plug-in or add-on program) deliver a message back to the user
stating that the message hasn't gone through yet, after an
admin-configurable length of time (presumably somewhere from 4-24 hours),
would be a useful thing.
This isn't necessarily a qmail feature request, since I can see a strong
case to be made for having this be an add-on. But it is a dissenting view
that I thought should be aired, because I'd like to counterbalance the view
I see here of "Messages like that are horrible; why would anyone want them?"
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Kai MacTane
System Administrator
Online Partners.com, Inc.
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From the Jargon File: (v4.0.0, 25 Jul 1996)
finger trouble /n./
Mistyping, typos, or generalized keyboard incompetence (this is
surprisingly common among hackers, given the amount of time they
spend at keyboards). "I keep putting colons at the end of statements
instead of semicolons", "Finger trouble again, eh?".
