[16397] in Athena Bugs
Re: sgi 8.2.10: the athena mail system
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Thu Oct 8 00:30:09 1998
To: Mike Barker <mbarker@MIT.EDU>
Cc: jered@MIT.EDU, bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 07 Oct 1998 23:56:54 EDT."
<4.0.1.19981007235150.00ed4100@po8.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 1998 00:30:00 EDT
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
The MIT mail system ("the athena mail system" is not a great name for
it) commonly delivers mail twice in the event of failures or high
load. It's pretty difficult to design a mail system which is robust
but never delivers a message twice. You can probably do better that
sendmail, or at least better than the current version fo sendmail on
the mail hubs, but seeing a message delivered twice is not really a
bug.
(It may be considered a bug for multiple deliveries to be presented to
the user, but that issues has been widely ignored by MUAs and tools
like dsmail for ages, so it's not a bug we're likely to fix in the
Athena environment any time soon.)
