Re: temporary failure warning message
Quoting Russell Nelson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): Chris Hardie writes: Unfortunately, that link appears to be broken. Brian Wightman, please pick up the nearest courtesy phone. It's also temporarily available as http://www.qmail.org/qmail_bounce-0.0alpha6.tar.gz . If Brian doesn't show up too soon, I'll change the link to point to my server. I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a post from Brian some time back where he stated he was no longer working on the notifier. He asked for volunteers to pick up the slack, I think. (ring ring - Uhhh, hello?) My ISP has changed a couple of times since that link was last updated. You can find the software off from my redirector page at http://bwightman.i.am/, but I would prefer if one of the other sites would become the distribution site for this, since I do not see myself maintaining it any more (family constraints, etc). If someone does decide to maintain it, I have a couple of suggestion mail messages from users of the software I could forward. Let me know, Brian
Re: temporary failure warning message
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: It's also temporarily available as http://www.qmail.org/qmail_bounce-0.0alpha6.tar.gz . If Brian doesn't show up too soon, I'll change the link to point to my server. (ring ring - Uhhh, hello?) My ISP has changed a couple of times since that link was last updated. You can find the software off from my redirector page at http://bwightman.i.am/, but I would prefer if one of the other sites would become the distribution site for this, since I do not see myself maintaining it any more (family constraints, etc). Okay, I'm now linking to my local copy of that file. If anyone updates it, please publish it and give me a link or give me the file itself to publish. -- -russ nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://russnelson.com Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | "Ask not what your country 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | can force other people to Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | do for you..." -Perry M.
Re: temporary failure warning message
Quoting Russell Nelson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): Chris Hardie writes: Unfortunately, that link appears to be broken. Brian Wightman, please pick up the nearest courtesy phone. It's also temporarily available as http://www.qmail.org/qmail_bounce-0.0alpha6.tar.gz . If Brian doesn't show up too soon, I'll change the link to point to my server. I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a post from Brian some time back where he stated he was no longer working on the notifier. He asked for volunteers to pick up the slack, I think. Aaron
Re: temporary failure warning message
Kai MacTane [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: 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. Our users constantly reply to such messages saying "please stop trying to deliver that message." *sigh* Once we switch away from sendmail, I'm strongly inclined to turn them off. I'd also significantly reduce the queue lifetime; honestly, if the message can't be delivered in two or three days, most e-mail users these days seem to have already concluded it will never get there and get really confused when it comes through. Our mail server that just sends out bounce messages already has a queue lifetime of just one day, but that's a special case (a very large number of those messages will just double-bounce and get silently discarded). -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/
Re: temporary failure warning message
Racer X [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: From: "Brian Johnson" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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. Yeah, but just because a bounce message was generated doesn't mean that the user gets it. I've seen a depressing quantity of users that put all sorts of random trash in their envelope sender and never see any of their bounces. Ideally, I'd track down the double-bounces and get the user to fix their configuration so that they see further bounces, but there really isn't enough time in the day for any significant user base. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/
Re: temporary failure warning message
Kai MacTane [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 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). There are, of course, other failure modes that will not result in a bounce. The SMTP protocol just wasn't designed to be perfectly reliable. We can whine about that, dream up various mechanisms to improve reliability, and write code to implement them, but in the end the situation won't really change. A reliable SMTP would no longer be SMTP. We'd need new MTA's and MUA's supporting the new protocol. It'd take years to define the protocol and develop the first implementations. It'd take more years for every system on the Internet to upgrade to the new protocol. A quick cost/benefit analysis shows that it ain't gonna happen. 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. There is, as has already been pointed out, a patch that does this. Unfortunately, that patch has been orphaned. I still think that if nondelivery warnings are done at all, they should be generated at the time of the first failed attempt. E.g.,: Hi. This is your friendly neighborhood mailer. I just tried to deliver your message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] But I was unable to reach example.com. I'll keep trying to delivery the message occasionally for (queuelifetime/(3600*24)) days. If you don't hear from me again before then, your message was delivered. 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?" I think they're annoying but I would never question anyone's right to have the feature. -Dave
Re: temporary failure warning message
On Apr 25 2000, Russ Allbery wrote: I'd also significantly reduce the queue lifetime; honestly, if the message can't be delivered in two or three days, most e-mail users these days seem to have already concluded it will never get there and get really confused when it comes through. If you're considering less than seven days for queuelifetime, do set it to at least four days -- it's frequently the case where a message was not delivered because some computer failed on a Friday afternoon and it can only be replaced/fixed on Monday morning and e-mails can't be delivered in the mean time... :-( So, three days may be a little short. Or should this mean that secondary MXs, once fought against begin to become a necessary condition? []s, Roger... -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Rogerio Brito - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito/ Nectar homepage: http://www.linux.ime.usp.br/~rbrito/opeth/ =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Re: temporary failure warning message
Rogerio Brito [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: So, three days may be a little short. Or should this mean that secondary MXs, once fought against begin to become a necessary condition? I use secondary MXes for all of my e-mail precisely because I want control over the queuing if a system goes down. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/
Re: temporary failure warning message
On Tue, 25 Apr 2000, Rogerio Brito wrote: If you're considering less than seven days for queuelifetime, do set it to at least four days -- it's frequently the case where a message was not delivered because some computer failed on a Friday afternoon and it can only be replaced/fixed on Monday morning and e-mails can't be delivered in the mean time... :-( So, three days may be a little short. Or should this mean that secondary MXs, once fought against begin to become a necessary condition? Good point. Here in Oz we've just had a 5 day weekend, thanks to Easter falling late and ANZAC day coming straight after Easter. Choose a value appropriate to your environment. Regards Peter -- Peter Samuel[EMAIL PROTECTED] Technical Consultantor at present: eServ. Pty Ltd [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: +61 2 9206 3410 Fax: +61 2 9281 1301 "If you kill all your unhappy customers, you'll only have happy ones left"
Re: temporary failure warning message
"J.M. Roth \(iip\)" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
is it possible to configure qmail to send out a "temporary failure" message
or something if mail can't be delivered rightaway?
No.
One of our users had an important mail in the queue which was returned to
him only 7 days later ('cause of a DNS failure), way too late...
Oh? What would the user have done had he known there was a DNS
failure?
Some
failure messages inbetween would be quite helpful.
That's one of sendmail's more annoying features, if you ask me.
-Dave
Re: temporary failure warning message
Dave Sill [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: "J.M. Roth \(iip\)" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: is it possible to configure qmail to send out a "temporary failure" message or something if mail can't be delivered rightaway? No. But if you're desperate, you can create this feature easily. Write a Perl script which either 1) grovels through the queue directories, or 2) runs /var/qmail/bin/qmail-qread, and sends a report to the original sender for messages enqueued longer than X minutes/hours/days. Some failure messages inbetween would be quite helpful. That's one of sendmail's more annoying features, if you ask me. 100% agreed. Don't even consider doing what I described above. If an email is _that_ time-sensitive, follow up using a phone call. Better yet, write ``Let me know AS SOON AS you receive this!'' inside the body of the email. Len. -- I'm more worried about real security problems than theoretical reliability problems. -- Dan Bernstein
Re: temporary failure warning message
At 4/24/2000 10:56 AM -0400, Dave Sill wrote or quoted:
"J.M. Roth \(iip\)" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
One of our users had an important mail in the queue which was returned to
him only 7 days later ('cause of a DNS failure), way too late...
Oh? What would the user have done had he known there was a DNS
failure?
He might have tried to fax, fed-ex, or otherwise send the information via
another medium.
Anyone who assumes that An Important Mail has been delivered intact
and read by the recipient simply because they didn't receive a warning
or bounce message deserves what they get.
-Dave
Re: temporary failure warning message
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 13:53:46 -0400 (EDT)
From: Dave Sill [EMAIL PROTECTED]
At 4/24/2000 10:56 AM -0400, Dave Sill wrote or quoted:
"J.M. Roth \(iip\)" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
One of our users had an important mail in the queue which was returned to
him only 7 days later ('cause of a DNS failure), way too late...
Oh? What would the user have done had he known there was a DNS
failure?
He might have tried to fax, fed-ex, or otherwise send the information via
another medium.
Anyone who assumes that An Important Mail has been delivered intact
and read by the recipient simply because they didn't receive a warning
or bounce message deserves what they get.
This is a real indictment of the state of the Internet.
I hope that someday people will trust the Internet the way they trust
the telephone system. How often have you heard somebody say ``You
didn't get my fax? I guess the Telco server was down.''
The Internet can and should be more reliable for this sort of usage.
Ian
Re: temporary failure warning message
Ian Lance Taylor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is a real indictment of the state of the Internet. It's more of an example of some of the differences between the ways different communication technologies/protocols work. I hope that someday people will trust the Internet the way they trust the telephone system. I already do, I just have different expectations for the two. How often have you heard somebody say ``You didn't get my fax? I guess the Telco server was down.'' Ever pick up the phone and not get a dialtone? Dial a number and get the "fast busy signal" that means "no circuits available"? Ever try to send someone a fax and get a busy signal, no answer, or a human? I sure have. The Internet can and should be more reliable for this sort of usage. SMTP and existing MUA's and MTA's were not designed for instantaneous delivery. If you want to force it to be more immediate, shorten your queuelifetime. -Dave
Re: temporary failure warning message
the only thing that makes the phone system more reliable than the internet is that you get an instant response, if you don't get a response then you know their's a problem. by the nature of e-mail you do-not get an instant response, so after some time of no response you have to assume the message didn't go through, if you use an instant message program on the other hand then you will get an (almost) instant response (as long as the person is at their desk), and will know your message has gotten through.. JUST as reliably as the phone system. snail mail is the same deal as e-mail (hence the similarity in names)... when you mail a letter you assume it's gotten where it's supposed to go, but sometimes (not often) letters _do_ get lost, and so if iut's something very importaint then you'll usually call in a reasonable amount of time (couple days) to make sure the other person got the letter... it's the nature of communications in general, not of the internet... actually it's more the nature of our existance - nothing can be guaranteed with absolute certainty, so you need to check everything... wow, that's alot longer than I planned - sorry for the rant.. -Brian Ian Lance Taylor wrote: This is a real indictment of the state of the Internet. I hope that someday people will trust the Internet the way they trust the telephone system. How often have you heard somebody say ``You didn't get my fax? I guess the Telco server was down.'' The Internet can and should be more reliable for this sort of usage. Ian
Re: temporary failure warning message
Ian Lance Taylor writes: Sure. You get a rapid indication of an error condition. qmail by default provides an indication of an error condition after 1 week. I would be interesting to see (someone else do :) a study of the time in the queue vs. success in delivery. How profitable is it to leave mail in the queue for seven days versus the four that Tom suggested? -- -russ nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://russnelson.com Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | "Ask not what your country 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | can force other people to Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | do for you..." -Perry M.
Re: temporary failure warning message
Ian Lance Taylor [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Dave Sill [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anyone who assumes that An Important Mail has been delivered intact and read by the recipient simply because they didn't receive a warning or bounce message deserves what they get. This is a real indictment of the state of the Internet. Not at all. Dave said, ``simply because they didn't receive a warning...'' In other words, you can't assume the message was received, simply because you WEREN'T told that it WASN'T received. You can only assume it was received if you HAVE been told it HAS been received. I hope that someday people will trust the Internet the way they trust the telephone system. I know you got my phone call, because I know I heard your voice. I know you got my fax, because fax machines DO acknowledge when a fax has been received. Email has no _general_ confirmation mechanism, except asking the recipient to ``hit reply so I know you got this.'' Len. -- There are two people at fault in every computer security breach: the attacker, and the programmer who let him in. -- Dan Bernstein
Re: temporary failure warning message
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 15:26:00 -0400 From: Brian Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] the person could just simply not be checking their e-mail, or you could've mistyped the address, or a million other things, so you just plain can't depend on the system, but the more checks you put in, the more you make the system _look_ perfect, the more easy you make it for users to assume that is _is_ perfect... You seem to be saying that there is no point to improving something unless we can make it perfect. However, I think we can all agree that in this world nothing is ever perfect. Therefore, you seem to be saying that we should never try to improve anything. If that isn't what you mean, then what do you mean? I'm not saying we should make things perfect. I'm saying we should make things better. And the first step is realizing that things are not good enough--or, in other words, that they are not perfect. Ian
Re: temporary failure warning message
From: "Len Budney" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 15:37:14 -0400 Not at all. Dave said, ``simply because they didn't receive a warning...'' In other words, you can't assume the message was received, simply because you WEREN'T told that it WASN'T received. You can only assume it was received if you HAVE been told it HAS been received. Why bother sending a bounce message at all, then? Ian
Re: temporary failure warning message
Ian Lance Taylor wrote: Why bother sending a bounce message at all, then? to help diagnose the problem? you send an e-mail to the only person who's address you know for sure, the sender, and he can fix the problem if it's on his end, or let the recipient into the problem if it's on their end.. much easier that going to the admin and looking through the logs to figure out the reason behind every failed message..
Re: temporary failure warning message
Russell Nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ian Lance Taylor writes: Sure. You get a rapid indication of an error condition. qmail by default provides an indication of an error condition after 1 week. I would be interesting to see (someone else do :) a study of the time in the queue vs. success in delivery. How profitable is it to leave mail in the queue for seven days versus the four that Tom suggested? I have three and a half days of old logs I ran through qmailanalog. The zddist script says: Distribution of ddelays for successful deliveries Meaning of each line: The first pct% of successful deliveries all happened within doneby seconds. The average ddelay was avg. doneby avg pct 175.68 72.00 90 185.54 74.41 91 197.96 77.15 92 214.85 80.45 93 229.72 84.12 94 262.56 88.66 95 302.85 94.62 96 1001.79 109.63 97 1275.71 141.99 98 10004.30 605.29 99 173893.00 607.67 100 So 99% of my messages were delivered within 3 hours (10800 s), and all were delivered within about 2 days (172800 s). This was for a chunk of log summarized by zoverall as: Basic statistics qtime is the time spent by a message in the queue. ddelay is the latency for a successful delivery to one recipient---the end of successful delivery, minus the time when the message was queued. xdelay is the latency for a delivery attempt---the time when the attempt finished, minus the time when it started. The average concurrency is the total xdelay for all deliveries divided by the time span; this is a good measure of how busy the mailer is. Completed messages: 15518 Recipients for completed messages: 85595 Total delivery attempts for completed messages: 92071 Average delivery attempts per completed message: 5.93317 Bytes in completed messages: 94519308 Bytes weighted by success: 284405101 Average message qtime (s): 502.863 Total delivery attempts: 175896 success: 162250 failure: 191 deferral: 13455 Total ddelay (s): 54231611.160887 Average ddelay per success (s): 334.247218 Total xdelay (s): 4135746.725588 Average xdelay per delivery attempt (s): 23.512455 Time span (days): 3.50192 Average concurrency: 13.6689 Now, this doesn't exactly measure what you asked for because it just looks at a 3.5 day snapshot: it doesn't follow N messages until they were either delivered or bounced. But, it's interesting that none of the messages in this period took more than two days to be delivered. I think it's clear that very few messages are delivered in the 4th through 7th days. -Dave
Re: temporary failure warning message
On Mon, Apr 24, 2000 at 01:02:53PM -0700, Ian Lance Taylor wrote: I haven't said what I want, beyond something better than the current situation, so this response does not seem to be to the point unless you think the current situation is ideal. I am trying to come up with something myself (http://www.zembu.com/) but Zembu Labs can't do it alone. I want to encourage people to realize that the Internet could stand improvement. Saying people should just accept the way things are, which is how I read Dave Sill's note to which I originally replied, is a hot button for me. 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: Ian I don't see why the current state of affairs is appropriate or even Ian reasonable. Ian You can't check everything, but it doesn't follow that we shouldn't Ian try to check what we can. Ian I'm not saying we should make things perfect. I'm saying we should Ian make things better. And the first step is realizing that things are Ian not good enough--or, in other words, that they are not perfect. 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" --Adam
Re: temporary failure warning message
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?" - Kai MacTane System Administrator Online Partners.com, Inc. - 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?".
Re: temporary failure warning message
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2000 16:17:27 -0400 From: Adam McKenna [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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: That feature is reliability from the perspective of the user who knows nothing about how the e-mail system works. That includes comprehensible failure modes. 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" If you think that things are OK the way they are, then we simply disagree. First, a minor point. I don't think that changing queuelifetime is good enough. It affects all messages globally. It doesn't let me say ``I need to know about this message, but not about this other message.'' It doesn't tell me ``it's been a hour to deliver this message--I'm still trying, but you might want to think about fixing something.'' Second, my actual point. Internet e-mail is pretty good, but I believe it could be a lot better. I encourage people to think of ways to make it better. If you see something that doesn't work right, don't just say ``well, that's the way it is.'' Instead, say ``we know that sucks, but nobody has fixed it yet.'' OK, I'll try to get off my soapbox now and drop this topic (except to answer any specific questions). Ian
Re: temporary failure warning message
On Mon, Apr 24, 2000 at 01:38:01PM -0700, Kai MacTane wrote: 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?" They're annoying to administrators, and they do little more than confuse users, which makes life even worse for the administrator, who now is getting bombarded with calls from users "why didn't my email go through" --Adam
Re: temporary failure warning message
On Mon, Apr 24, 2000 at 01:31:49PM -0700, Ian Lance Taylor wrote: First, a minor point. I don't think that changing queuelifetime is good enough. It affects all messages globally. It doesn't let me say ``I need to know about this message, but not about this other message.'' It doesn't tell me ``it's been a hour to deliver this message--I'm still trying, but you might want to think about fixing something.'' You're right -- that's what qmail-qstat and qmail-qread are for. --Adam
Re: temporary failure warning message
On 24 Apr 2000, Ian Lance Taylor wrote: First, a minor point. I don't think that changing queuelifetime is good enough. It affects all messages globally. It doesn't let me say ``I need to know about this message, but not about this other message.'' It doesn't tell me ``it's been a hour to deliver this message--I'm still trying, but you might want to think about fixing something.'' There's a link from the qmail website to Brian Wightman's delayed-mail notifier, which serves this purpose quite faithfully (runs on cron, scans the queue and sends a message to the sender letting them know about the delay) and seems to be the piece of software several folks are looking for. Unfortunately, that link appears to be broken. Brian Wightman, please pick up the nearest courtesy phone. I have a copy from Feb 99; it's the one we've been using in production for some time now and it's never let us down. 9K download: http://www.summersault.com/chris/techno/qmail/qmail_bounce-0.0alpha6.tar.gz Note that it's an alpha release, and that I didn't write it, and that I won't support it, and that I probably won't answer questions about it, and that I don't want to be the primary download site for it. I hope this helps. Chris -- Chris Hardie - - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://www.summersault.com/chris/ --
Re: temporary failure warning message
Kai MacTane wrote: 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). 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 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 for everything possible, then users who don't know how the system works will assume than _every_ error will return an error message which just can never be the case. the only way to make the system foolproof that I can think of is by implementing some kind of automatic return reciepts built into to the MUA. have it automatically request a reciept whenever a message is sent, and whenever a reciept is recieved flag that message as "recieved" otherwise flag the message as "in transit". the problem with this is both ends have to support it for it to work properly, but this would do 2 things - instantly educate the user that the system's not infallable, and solve your need for error messages. -Brian
Re: temporary failure warning message
Chris Hardie writes: Unfortunately, that link appears to be broken. Brian Wightman, please pick up the nearest courtesy phone. It's also temporarily available as http://www.qmail.org/qmail_bounce-0.0alpha6.tar.gz . If Brian doesn't show up too soon, I'll change the link to point to my server. -- -russ nelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://russnelson.com Crynwr sells support for free software | PGPok | "Ask not what your country 521 Pleasant Valley Rd. | +1 315 268 1925 voice | can force other people to Potsdam, NY 13676-3213 | +1 315 268 9201 FAX | do for you..." -Perry M.
Re: temporary failure warning message
On Mon, Apr 24, 2000 at 02:02:13PM -0700, Kai MacTane wrote: Could you elaborate on the part about such messages being annoying to administrators? Administrators use email too. --Adam
Re: temporary failure warning message
- 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]
