This may be a divergence from the topic, so I'll apologize in advance, but
Vernon's point about bounced emails struck a cord with me. I made the
mistake of leaving a couple of options on my MS Outlook which causes a
receipt to be sent back to me when an email is delivered and when it's read.
At this point, the flurry has calmed down from my first email to the list,
save for a couple of auto-responses from NTMail in the name of
951rkly(_at_)sbs(_dot_)oxon(_dot_)sch(_dot_)uk
<mailto:951rkly(_at_)sbs(_dot_)oxon(_dot_)sch(_dot_)uk> . I've been getting
repetitive delivery and read acknowledgements, which seemed to have abated
but have started up again. Does anyone know how I could go about addressing
this? Thanks for your time and consideration.
-----Original Message-----
From: Vernon Schryver
[mailto:vjs(_at_)calcite(_dot_)rhyolite(_dot_)com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2000 10:56 PM
To: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re:
draft-ietf-nat-protocol-complications-02.txt
> From: "Steven M. Bellovin"
<smb(_at_)research(_dot_)att(_dot_)com>
> ...
> There is some data indicating that Keith is right, that
there are problems in
> the DNS. See, for example,
http://www.research.att.com/~edith/Papers/infocom2000.ps
I don't think I understand the connection between that paper
about
"Prefetching the Means for Dcoument Transfer: A New Approach
for Reducing
Web Latency" and Keith's statement that DNS email errors are
usually on
the receiver's side:
] (email errors are usually detected by the sender of a
message, since
] that's who gets the bounced message. but the party who
has responsibility
] for fixing the error is usually not on the sender's end of
things)
My perhaps irrelevant, boring, or even wrong claim was that
I'm seeing
more sender-side than receiver-side SMTP+DNS problems.
If the relevance of that paper is that people are have fun
and
games with DNS to help HTTP, and that causes DNS errors that
in
turn cause DNS problems seen by HTTP clients, then that's
consistent
with my personal experience and my claim. I see many crazy
DNS failures in my personal web surfing. (crazy either
because
obviously silly for a very big, presumably competently run
site
or because temporary, which says either roots are hosed or
the same
very big, presumably competent site is crazy...have I
mentioned
lately how frequently Akamai is not working for me?)
I bet that the types and frequencies of DNS errors varies
with the
application, which strikes me as a significant change from
how things used
to be. For example, how many SMTP servers are behind DNS
names that do
fancy load balancing?--yes, I think I can name a very few,
but isn't the
vast majority of SMTP load balancing and so forth based on
turning off
the listen socket (e.g. sendmail), MX records, and non-fancy
round-robin
RR serving? On the extreme, every venture capital fund
seems to still be
shoveling money at anyone who wants to try anything you'd
care to mention
(and lots more besides) to make HTTP go faster, and many of
those schemes
seem to involve DNS creativity.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com