On Wed, 17 Apr 2002, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 16, 2002 at 10:36:40PM -0700, Tom Samplonius wrote:
> > You can ignore bounced bounces, rather than freezing them.
>
> Erm, I'm sorry!?!? Do you run anything even remotely approaching a reliable
> mail service? do you claim to? A human should look at bounced bounces and
> try and deal with them (which may be deleting them if they are spam, but
> which may be misconfiguration errors, which can be fixed, if they are not)
>
> Basically, this is why there is a postmaster. If you don't want to do a
> postmaster job, then don't do it, but don't tell other people that you
> can do it without understanding the implications of what you are doing.
But in a double bounce case, there is no way to determine a delivery
point, so how is a human supposed to fix this? I know it is a great way
to justify admin time and bulk up staff, but it is valueless work. You
are simply not going to get though messages through to anybody.
> > Why keep bounced bounces around for even 2 days? Do you even look at
> > them? If not there is no need to keep them, just use
> > "ignore_errmsg_errors". They are hard errors, and retries won't change
> > that. You should only freeze them unless you intend to examine them.
>
> I assume by "unless" you mean "if".
>
> In a reliable mail system *NO* message gets dropped on the floor without
> being delivered finally, delivering a bounce, or passing by a human
> administrator. The '250' response in SMTP to the final '.' of the message
> means that you take this responsibility seriously. If you are so deluged
> with bounced bounces, then can I suggest that you enable the
> receiver_verify option in exim3 or the appropriate ACL option in exim4.
receiver_verify enabled, plus SMTP callbacks on many domains. This
reduces the remaining doubled bounces to completely undeliverable
messages.
> > 218,000 deliveries yesterday. No frozen messages!
>
> And reliable as a chocolate teapot.
100% reliable for messages with at least a valid recipient or a valid
sender.
> It pains me to see the number of people who don't take mail delivery
> seriously, and I wonder why the standards even exist when people flout
> them so blatantly.
Hah! It isn't part of the standard for humans to examine double
bounces!
> MBM
>
> --
> Matthew Byng-Maddick <mbm@???> http://colondot.net/
Tom
