On 2007-02-04 09:06:07 -0800, Claus Assmann wrote:
On Sun, Feb 04, 2007, Peter J. Holzer wrote:
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that committing on a
per-recipient basis (as LMTP does) is more robust. I do agree that it is
more difficult to implement on the server side, though.
What does "committing" mean for you here?
Saving the information that the message should be delivered to the
recipient and telling the client that responsibility for further
delivery has been accepted.
The deferrals draft only commits once for all recipients: Either all or
none get the message. Consequently if the client doesn't receive the
final reply, it has to assume that none of the recipients will receive
it and resend it to all of them.
In LMTP, the server commits for every recipient. If the client receives
only replies for some of the recipients, it has to assume that those for
which it got replies will be delivered and resend only to those for
which it got no replies.
What exactly do you want
to commit? Do you want to do like this:
- is there any RCPT that is accepted?
. yes: commit data
- for each RCPT:
is it accepted?
- yes: commit RCPT
send reply
. no: trivial case
That's not very efficient as a "commit" (e.g., fsync()) is the most
expensive I/O operations on conventional hardware.
Yes. It's more expensive but more robust than Eric's draft, I think.
(Also, I'm not sure how expensive fsync() really is if there are lots of
fsync() requests - AFAIK order doesn't have to be maintained, so the OS
can optimize quite a lot there - but does it?).
I've implemented "DRR" in my SMTP server, and I noticed that the
LMTP model, i.e., no explicit "end of mail data" reply, introduces
some problems:
- it requires special code to deal with the fact that a command
doesn't have a reply.
Why doesn't it have a reply? It has one reply for every remaining
recipient, and since there must be at least one (otherwise DATA returns
a 503 reply) there is at least one reply.
- the error handling in case of a lost connection is more complicated.
Hence I'm strongly in favor of an "extended" LMTP model where
additionally to the individual RCPT responses a separate "end of
mail data" response is used.
"end of mail data" sounds to me like it is sent before the individual
rcpt replies. But from your reasoning I think you want it after the
individual replies, like the "final response code" in Eric's draft.
Right?
hp
--
_ | Peter J. Holzer | I know I'd be respectful of a pirate
|_|_) | Sysadmin WSR | with an emu on his shoulder.
| | | hjp(_at_)hjp(_dot_)at |
__/ | http://www.hjp.at/ | -- Sam in "Freefall"
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