At 8:09 PM -0500 3/30/06, Bill Cole sent email regarding Re:
Reasonable Connection Timeout:
At 4:15 PM -0700 3/30/06, Warren Michelsen imposed structure on a
stream of electrons, yielding:
I'm having a problem with one company, a cable Internet provider,
connecting to my mail server. They say it cannot be contacted, that
connection attempts by their server to mine time out.
How quickly should a server time out while waiting for a response
from my server? What's a reasonable amount of time? Should a server
give up if there's no response within the first 10 seconds?
That's absurd, and in direct conflict with long-established norms as
well as the guideline in RFC2821 of 5 minutes on initial connection.
and
At 4:22 PM -0800 3/30/06, Christopher Bort wrote:
Ten seconds is definitely unreasonably short. For one thing, these days
many SMTP servers intentionally delay sending their intial prompt in order
to weed out spambots that start issuing commands without waiting for the
prompt.
OK, that's what I thought. Someone tried to telnet to my server (to
help diagnose a problem) and said that the 8-second delay he
encountered might be the reason the cable provider's mail servers
were not connecting to mine. To me, that's like placing a phone call
and hanging up halfway through the first ring because you got no
answer.
Thanks for confirming what I suspected. I was not aware the the
5-minute recommendation in RFC2821.
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