[26524] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: mail does bounce (was: Customers down?)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christian Kuhtz)
Sun Jan 2 16:35:14 2000
Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 16:29:52 -0500
From: Christian Kuhtz <ck@arch.bellsouth.net>
To: Owen DeLong <owen@dixon.delong.sj.ca.us>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu, sean@donelan.com
Message-ID: <20000102162952.K29120@ns1.arch.bellsouth.net>
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In-Reply-To: <200001022031.MAA24085@irkutsk.delong.sj.ca.us>; from Owen DeLong on Sun, Jan 02, 2000 at 12:31:00PM -0800
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
On Sun, Jan 02, 2000 at 12:31:00PM -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
> Attempting to resolve a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i
>
> If you get back a return value from DNS that says
> "Authoritative answer, a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i does not exist"
> Bounce the mail.
>
> If you get back a return that says
> "Resolving a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i timed out without a return"
> Queue the mail.
>
> This also works for i, h.i, g.h.i, f.g.h.i, etc.
I agree that this is the most sensible minimum functionality. What do you
break if you treat what you consider persistent terminal conditions as
transient?
Perhaps your business policy is to deliver all mail that can possibly be
delivered, making the assumption that everything's transient unless the system
has what it considers reasonable proof that it is indeed permanent (after
for instance several attempts spread out over a period of time).
Personally, I don't like systems which do not have backup paths to deal with
transient conditions. And we do know that even "authoritative does not exist"
can be a transient error condition caused by a registry glitch etc. Sure, we
can all just ignore reality and assume we live in a perfect world, but....
Cheers,
Chris
--
Christian Kuhtz Architecture, BellSouth.net
<ck@arch.bellsouth.net> -wk, <ck@gnu.org> -hm Atlanta, GA
"Speaking for myself only."
