Another horror story that I thought I'd pass out to see if anyone can
think of a good solution...
Last week a US site sent one of our customers a mail message. This
was not your common or garden message - it was 18MB in size!!!
The US site's gateway mailer obviously has a couple of problems... it
looked very much as though it had a timeout on the data part of the
SMTP transaction, and typically 10MB got through and then the session
was wrapped up and it tried again - immediately!!!
This US site had good connectivity. To make matters worse, through
much of the day I could see 3 simultaneous SMTP sessions into our
system!
You can guess that this did not do our spare spool space much good.
I finally ended up blackballing the sender machine on all our MX
hosts until they sorted the problem. Meanwhile I tried to contact
them without much sucess - their main number gave me a robotic
answering service without any clues as to how to go one, their whois
data gave the home number of an ex-employee (he wasn't happy with a
3am phone call), their ISPs phone number (from their WWW pages) put
me in contact with a medical answering service!!!
I cannot think of a recipient mailer method of dealing with this,
unless you record message-id/sender info and do something with that,
which is an utter hack, however others may have some useful ideas!
Nigel.
--
[ Nigel.Metheringham@??? - Unix Applications Engineer ]
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