--As of July 1, 2014 9:40:05 PM -0500, Steve Bergman is alleged to have
said:
95+% of the time, email is immediate, true.
More like 99%+ of the time. When it's not, I hear about it.
But it is not uncommon for
mail to be delayed for hours or days either,
It's uncommon enough that when it does happen I get a phone call about a
user "not being able to receive email".
It's common enough that I saw it every day in my last job. 99.9% of the
time the users didn't notice, or care. On the other hand there were the
times I had to show them the log files showing exactly when we got and sent
the message, and had to have a talk about expectations. (Nearly always the
message had gone through our system in seconds.)
even without greylisting.
Greylisting is an ugly hack that I'm hesitant to even dignify by having
the topic of serious conversation.
I won't defend it. I've never used it. ;)
I'm not at all sure what you're talking about regarding email vs web form
reliability. What are the links in that chain?
The email client can malfunction in some way. But then again, so can a
browser. The sending server can malfunction in some way. But so can the
web proxy. Then WAN link can go down on the sending side. But then, that
can happen with both web and email. The receiving side's WAN can go down
too. But in the case of a mail server it tries and tries and tries to get
the message through as quickly as possible. The browser and proxy server
certainly don't. They just drop it if anything goes wrong.
I only said that it won't fail silently: If you are depending on it for
immediate communications, you'll know when you didn't get that, while with
email it'll be hidden.
Maybe 'better' wasn't the right word: It's a trade off. If you want the
message to go through, email is set up to keep trying. If you want the
message to go *now*, the web form will tell you if it did (making the
assumption that the form returns a 'message delivered' screen once it has
delivered the message), and the user can try for another form of
communication if it fails.
You tell me that email is unreliable. And yet anyone can see that it *is*
quite reliable, until you, as a mail admin, foolishly introduce the
self-DOSing technique of greylisting, and fall on your own sword.
You can go on about how it makes sense to fall on your sword. But I'm a
realist, and not buying it.
As I said: I've never used greylisting. I have seen mail queues regularly
holding messages for hours or days. Email is fairly reliable - but I
wouldn't let a user treat it as 100% reliable and immediate, because I know
it isn't. Better a few hard conversations about expectations and options
then lost business due to using the wrong tool for the job.
I'll also be typing this post up, putting a stamp on it, and mailing it.
It might reach you there faster. ;-)
Not faster, but probably more reliable. ;)
How many people here actually use greylisting and don't get complaints?
Our ISP, who previously handled our email certainly didn't introduce any
noticeable delays. And nobody ever got a noticeable amount of spam, or
reported to me a missed or late email.
Then they didn't notice them. In the normal course of things, most mail
gets through in seconds, and most of the delays are in the range of minutes
to hours - short enough that people don't see them unless they are paying
close attention. (And they may not be checking mail that often anyway.)
Amazing, IMO. But it was obviously done without the ridiculous and
unacceptable practice of greylististing.
I want to achieve the results that Windstream does.
You probably can. ;) But I'm sure Windstream didn't get you every piece
of mail immediately after it was sent - just as soon as they could after
they got it. I'm not even saying I like greylisting - I'm just saying you
should work to set user expectations to reality, which is that email
sometimes takes time to get delivered and (rarely) gets lost. If something
is absolutely time-critical, they should treat email as a backup, not the
primary form of communication. If it can spare an hour or two on occasion,
email's fine.
Daniel T. Staal
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