This doesn't deal with the case where the data never stops.
In all the years I've been running mail servers, I don't ever recall seeing
a sender that never stopped. How often have you seen one?
Once. A windows box in the UAE, if I remember correctly. It connected, sent
MAIL FROM and RCP TO, got a 50x, disconnected, and tried again five minutes
later. When I noticed it, it had been doing so for as long as I had logs,
probably 99 weeks.
No, I meant where the data in a single DATA connection never stops, since
that is the alleged problem that this argument is about.
If, as I suspect, it has never happened in the entire history of the
Internet, why in the world is anyone wasting time worrying about it? The
scenario you describe is rare enough and has little enough impact that you
could deal with it by hand.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.