[wellylug] Administrivia: broken mail servers

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <1081978175.1067.2.camel at jenna>, Chris Hodgetts writes:
>My understanding was that mail would cue up and not provide the delivery
>error unless the smtp server at the other side did not accecpt the mail,
>or it timed out.

The message won't bounce back to the sender for, typically, about 5 days,
and will lie around the mail queue of the sender if it is not able to
pass it to some "closer" MX (main MX for the domain or a secondary MX).

However this isn't quite the same thing as "not [providing] a delivery
error", since the delivery of the messages is retried frequently.  I can
tell you for free that my logs are quite littered with delivery errors
for subscribers to the wellylug mailing list in particular; at around
one delivery error (log message) per mailing list message per hour, and
about 40 messages per day (vague average), over 5 days that's several
thousand delivery errors being logged.

I really don't have the patience to have my mail server logs filled with
thousands of extra "delivery failed" messages due to poorly run mail
servers.  Hence my message indicating that addresses that are
undeliverable for days on end will be disabled and have their mail
deleted from the mail queue; and it if happens often the address will be
banned.

If you are going to subscribe to a (fairly) busy mailing list it is only
polite to ensure that your mail server will accept mail most of the
time.  That means that it's receiving mail practically every day, and
pretty much all of every day.  Being down for 5 days at a time is a long
long way from polite.

If you can't maintain that sort of level of service (ie, up most of most
days), subscribe another address to the mailing list which is on a more
professionally run mail server, or use a secondary MX or whatever.

And FWIW this has basically nothing to do with the choice of transport
(cable modem, ADSL, etc), however I've noticed that people running mail
servers over their cable modem, in general, tend to do it less
professionally than those that are connected via more "business" style
Internet connections (Citylink, E1, frame relay, fibre, etc).

Ewen