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Re: Recipient is offline

2011-09-02 14:29:43

On Sep 2, 2011, at 1:14 PM, John Levine wrote:

More to the point, SMTP is designed to transfer mail to servers that
are online and available most of the time.  The retry stuff is
intended to deal with temporary overloads and failures, not a system
that is only connected for part of each day.

Twenty years ago, there were still a lot of part time connections.
There's nothing magic about SMTP as a way to get mail from one host to
another, and we had a variety of hacks to get mail to them, from TURN
to uucp to, in extreme cases, magtapes sent by mail.  All the hacks
are still available for people who need them.  This isn't an SMTP
problem.

+1.  UUCP was tailor-made for this, works well, and AFAIK high-quality, 
zero-cost implementations are still available.  

Keith

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