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/