[geeks] ADMINISTRIVIA: Changes to mail delivery policies

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, March 13, 2002 at 16:18:45 (-0600), Jonathan C. Patschke wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] ADMINISTRIVIA: Changes to mail delivery policies
>
> I beg to differ.  My ISP sucks, and I'd lose a great bit of mail (or at
> least annoy people sending mail to me with floods of DSNs) if I weren't
> borrowing an MX from Bill[1].

Sure, if your connection is down for more than a "normal" amount of
time....  but in that case you probably want to move your MX, not just
set up a secondary MX that'll hide all your e-mail in its queue for the
duration....

> Even when I worked at $ISP, we had -two- second-tier MXes.  We're in
> Texas.  Our second-tier MXes were in Ohio and California.  You can only
> imagine how nice this was when $Datacenter lost power for several hours
> due to a UPS failure or when $Upstream forgot that we existed, and
> decommissioned our IP address space.

No, I can't quite imagine.  Even if you/they owned and operated those
machines and had full control over them there's not much point to
landing all your e-mail in Ohio and then having to pull it down to Texas
again.  Why not just leave it where it belongs -- in the sender's queue?

Amy says she doesn't care if the mailer holds her outgoing mail and
tries to send it for some decent period of time.  Perhaps she even
really wants to see when a message isn't immediately deliverable.  Your
configuration takes that control out of her hands, and maybe even out of
your own hands, causing her mail to have to sit in some remote mailer's
queue for an even more undefined period of time, often with no
indication of where it is or why it hasn't been delivered yet.

> Load balancing is -not- the only reason to have a secondary MX.

If, and _ONLY_ if you directly control the MTA on the secondary MX host.

But then why add another machine to your worries?

>  Not having one is about as bright as not keeping backups.

That's pure and utter BS.  Even in the early days of the Internet there
was no real reason to need a secondary MX.

The only reason you might need a secondary MX is to deal with the very
few people who don't follow the well proven guidelines for retrying
deliveries for at least 4 to 5 days.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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