David Brodbeck wrote:
On Thu, 5 Aug 2004 19:33:55 -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote
Although some of us can't. Running a large customer service mail
server, for example, where people in the field have hostnames *that
haven't propagated through DNS yet to the receiver's mail server*
means the mail will be at least deferred, if not actually blocked.
Still, the window where that can happen is pretty small. Maybe,
what, half an
hour? It's not worth accepting piles of spam in order to avoid the
risk of
rejecting mail during that small window, at least for me. You won't
be able
to reply until the hostname has propegated anyway.
This depends on the records. Some sites leave their DNS records with
expiration on the order of a day to reduce client hits on their overwhelmed
DNS servers, and some clients ignore the DNS expiration and cache their last
record for up to 24 hours. (I've had that happen on old machines in the
fields, it drove me *nuts* until I found out how badly Microsoft was doing
DNS on their clients.) Being unable to reach your corporate offices or
having mail go wonky while that timeout occurs can sometimes be completely
unacceptable.
In a normal email setting, I do agree with you that the window is slight.
But when the boss or the boss's secretary doesn't get their critical lunch
date email with the investors, or gets it late because of your anti-spam
efforts, even if the snti-spam effort is 99.9% effective because of your
aggressive filtering, you can still lose your job.