On Sun, 2008-05-18 at 23:50 +0100, Karanbir Singh wrote: > Christopher Chan wrote: > ><snip> > >> Besides, as John already pointed out, emails in the spools can hang > >> around for days. I believe most MTA's only discard completely after > >> 7days of non delivery. > > > > That default setting is no longer applicable today. Users will scream if > > they find out that their mails have been sitting in the queue for a day. > > Mail will wait with a delay if there is a problem with the remote end > receiving the emails. Users will screan much more if they find that > their emails are just going into /dev/null and they are having to work > the retry mechanism by hand rather than their email server. Besides, if > I send an email at 2am and there was a network outage at the remote end, > its nice to know that > > > For today's businesses, one day can make or break a deal and so email, > > being a much faster form of communication than snail mail, has come to > > be seen as the preferred choice. People start calling when they know > > they are supposed to get an email in a minute or so when it does > > materialize. > > Your point is well made, however - email does normally go in a single > stream. Its when there is a problem and a retry mechanism hasto kick in > that there is a problem. Its only the crazy goons who develop MS > Exchange who havent got their head around this problem, something solved > by the general internet users about 25 years back. Only as a bit of interesting (to me) FYI: actually when we were using uucp for mail prior to the widespread deployment of the internet, this was solved in the same way it is now. I worked for Western Electric at the time and made a presentation to DARPA down at the U of Georgia demonstrating how interactive terminal-to-terminal communication and inter-node mail could be facilitated using UNIX (R). Needless to say, there were some very bright folks there. We began hearing about something called "internet" that would be coming on the scene. First application was for defense. Then it spread to colleges and universities. I must have shipped out 200-300 UNIX (R) distributions on tape (the big ones) to colleges and government organizations in the next year. And volume kept growing. Anyway, the point is that the problem was solved in the 1978 - 1979 time frame. So its at least 30 years. > <snip> -- Bill