Re: [Exim] MX Record points to non-existent host

On Sun, 2003-02-23 at 00:29, Greg Louis wrote:
> That would be nice :) Look, the point you're making here is valid, I
> understand it, I agree with it, but I decline to be the only one in the
> whole damn 'net (except for people who can afford to throw away email
> from important correspondents) to stand up and try to enforce it!

Note that you don't actually have to throw away email.

The tactic I use is to file crap like HTML, replies without References:
or In-Reply-To: headers, mail from RBL-listed hosts, etc. into a
separate 'probably-spam' folder rather than the real spam bin where
SpamAssassin-marked mail goes.

I can then check the 'probably-spam' folder as often (or not) as I see
fit, and reply after a delay of a day or two (or more, depending on the
circumstances) -- apologising for the delay and explaining that a reply
would have been forthcoming faster had it not been for the breakage
which caused the sender's mail to end up in said folder.

Of course you then retain the option of replying immediately and not
mentioning it, if you really want the business and you can't take the
risk of leaving it a day or so.

That's for incoming mail, of course -- and we've been discussing
outgoing mail, or at least we were to start with. But you can take the
same approach for that too. Let the mail bounce, send it again the next
day by temporarily disabling the sanity check or injecting it to the
identified IP address manually. And again -- if it bounces you do have
the option of resending it immediately without mentioning it.

Of course, I get away with it because I'm usually doing support tasks --
so my correspondent has a problem and they actually want to receive my
responses. And when they _do_ send me correct mail I have to make a
point of responding quickly to it to accentuate the difference. For
sales leads or difficult customers I tend to respond without mentioning
the problem, as soon as I notice their mail.

Implementing such a policy on a wider scale has other problems, of
course -- you'd need your salesdroids to actually be capable of reading
bounce messages and behaving appropriately -- either by using an
external webmail account or forwarding to the local postmaster with a
request that the mail be forwarded to the intended address somehow.

The latter obviously means more work for the postmaster as the
salesdroids will end up forwarding _all_ bounces, and the former
requires some intelligence from salesdroids so is obviously not going to
happen. But it seems to work for me :)

--
dwmw2