Re: mail does bounce (was: Customers down?)
On Sat, 01 January 2000, "Steven J. Sobol" wrote:
What I was referring to was a situation where the domain does exist in the root nameservers but the authoritative nameservers are unavailable.
So .COM exists in the root servers? How do you decide to treat second level domains (i.e. donelan.com) versus third level domains (i.e. www.donelan.com) versus third level domains under country code domains.
I'll take a stab at this: Attempting to resolve a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i If you get back a return value from DNS that says "Authoritative answer, a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i does not exist" Bounce the mail. If you get back a return that says "Resolving a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i timed out without a return" Queue the mail. This also works for i, h.i, g.h.i, f.g.h.i, etc. Owen
On Sun, Jan 02, 2000 at 12:31:00PM -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
Attempting to resolve a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i
If you get back a return value from DNS that says "Authoritative answer, a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i does not exist" Bounce the mail.
If you get back a return that says "Resolving a.b.c.d.e.f.g.h.i timed out without a return" Queue the mail.
This also works for i, h.i, g.h.i, f.g.h.i, etc.
I agree that this is the most sensible minimum functionality. What do you break if you treat what you consider persistent terminal conditions as transient? Perhaps your business policy is to deliver all mail that can possibly be delivered, making the assumption that everything's transient unless the system has what it considers reasonable proof that it is indeed permanent (after for instance several attempts spread out over a period of time). Personally, I don't like systems which do not have backup paths to deal with transient conditions. And we do know that even "authoritative does not exist" can be a transient error condition caused by a registry glitch etc. Sure, we can all just ignore reality and assume we live in a perfect world, but.... Cheers, Chris -- Christian Kuhtz Architecture, BellSouth.net <ck@arch.bellsouth.net> -wk, <ck@gnu.org> -hm Atlanta, GA "Speaking for myself only."
At 04:29 PM 1/2/00 -0500, Christian Kuhtz wrote:
Personally, I don't like systems which do not have backup paths to deal with transient conditions. And we do know that even "authoritative does not exist" can be a transient error condition caused by a registry glitch etc. Sure, we can all just ignore reality and assume we live in a perfect world, but....
I prefer to know immediately if I mistyped an e-mail address, which happens more often than even NetSol's screwups, rather than wait five days (or even four hours) to get a bounce from a message I thought had been delivered. And if it is a NetSol screwup, I would like to know that ASAP as well.
Christian Kuhtz Architecture, BellSouth.net
TTFN, patrick -- I Am Not An Isp - www.ianai.net ISPF, The Forum for ISPs by ISPs, <http://www.ispf.com> "Think of it as evolution in action." - Niven & Pournelle (OhMyGod - Watch out 'Net, I got enable again! ;-)
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