On Aug 9, 2010, at 5:10 PM, Dave CROCKER wrote:
I did a 10-second scan of 5321 and didn't find the relevant text, but
I'd like
to resolve -- and preferably squash -- this issue quickly.
Just came into the office and saw nearly 20 emails on this. Great
conversation, but not "quickly" :)
At 19:27 09-08-10, ned+ietf-smtp(_at_)mrochek(_dot_)com wrote:
I have a somewhat different take on this. First of all, I have always
thought the admonition that you MUST minimize the amount of time spent
before responding to the trailing dot to the greatest extent possible
was, well, bunk.
(It's also an effectively unenforceable MUST - who can say you've done
all you can or not? - which is bad in its own right.) While it is
important not to spend too much time, the difference between a
millisecond delay and a 2 second delay is, in this situation, not
worth worrying about.
Completely agree for several reasons, including that the only senders
that take advantage of "as fast as you can process" scenarios are
spammers. If I take a second or two to accept a message from a legit
sender they neither know nor care. But to a spammer, the faster we
receive and delivery the more mail gets through before a content filter
or blocklist can update. We saw this happen when we migrated to our
current system 3 years ago. Spam was delivered at many hundreds of
times faster than mail from AOL, Hotmail and Gmail combined. Responding
as quickly as my system will allow with <CRLF>.<CRLF> helps no one I
want to help.