On Apr 18, 2006, at 6:56 PM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
If you knew the distribution of transit times based on some
reasonable sample, then I'd listen. Presumably there's a bell
curve in there and we could argue about how many std. devs. to
ask signers to take into account. Anything less soundly based
is only as good as our charter, i.e. "a few days at most" so
we may as well stick with that.
Factoring on normal successful deliveries misses an uncommon, but
important, class of messages: those delayed by temporary transport
failures. E.g. hardware-induced SMTP server failure, intermediate
network outages, system- and network-admin PEBKAC, recipient mail
store quota violations, and inbound SMTP server throttling (AOL,
Yahoo). All of these are out of the transacting parties control
(even the quota case, since the receiver can't always control what
gets dumped in their inbox).
What we need to examine are the stat's related to these delay
scenarios, and base the lifetime on those numbers, ignoring the
typical successful delivery case. (My guess is that sendmail's
default delivery timeout will heavily influence the results.)
--lyndon
_______________________________________________
NOTE WELL: This list operates according to
http://mipassoc.org/dkim/ietf-list-rules.html