ietf-smtp
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Keep Alive Response Codes

2005-09-15 06:31:07

At 13:34 15/09/2005, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
Paul Smith writes:
I really don't think an SMTP service extension would solve the problem - the problem is system administrators who decide they know better than the standards and set low timeouts.

Can you talk a little about those system administrators? How many are there of them?

A friend who did a little analysis said that 100.0% of the hosts that gave up too quickly and switched to the secondary MX were actually sending spam. IIRC "quickly" meant 45 seconds and he looked at around a thousand messages. Not a really big sample, but enough that I would look for counterevidence before assuming that the conclusion is wrong.

I obviously don't know how many there are, but I've seen problems from several senders when our server has taken over a minute to respond after a DATA command, and this wasn't with spam, but with legitimate email which we would have received over and over again if I hadn't put in a temporary rule to get it past the spam filter.

It's not all system administrators by any means, but there are some..

If no administrators of legitimate email systems had short timeouts this would be a non-issue.


Paul                            VPOP3 - Internet Email Server/Gateway
support(_at_)pscs(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk                      http://www.pscs.co.uk/


<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>