----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Johnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Qmail-List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Mon 24 Apr 2000 13:47
Subject: Re: temporary failure warning message
> > 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).
>
> you forgot the possibility of
> 4) Message gets totally lost and NO-ONE gets any warning...
> this can happen for many reasons. from entering the wrong e-mail
address
> accidentally and whoever gets it ignores/deletes it, to the server
failing and
That happens to be a case of #1 above. The message was successfully
delivered to the address specified by the user. Do you honestly expect
any MTA to correct those "errors"?
> losing the message. this was my point earlier, you can't always count
on
> getting an error message if there is an error, because there's
_always_ a
> chance that the message will be lost without a trace. so if you do
make errors
Not if you have a halfway decent MTA. Writing bulletproof software is
not impossible. There are only so many states the message can be in.
Of course, the disk drive could always melt down with messages in queue,
in which case you'd be screwed and the message could disappear. But I'd
say that recovering from that kind of failure is a little outside the
scope of an MTA.
shag
=====
Judd Bourgeois | Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Senior Software Developer | Phone: 805.520.7170
CNM Network | Mobile: 805.807.1162 or
http://www.cnmnetwork.com | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
