[H-GEN] Humbug machine problems and lost email

[Greg Black]

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Robert Brockway wrote:

| On Tue, 24 Sep 2002, Greg Black wrote:
| 
| > But the messages that were sent on Saturday and Sunday have not
| > been delivered.  The Saturday message got one of those warning
| > messages from mailer-daemon at mailhub1.uq.edu.au:
| >
| > <gjb at humbug.org.au>... Deferred: Connection timed out with caliburn.humbug.org.au.
| > Warning: message still undelivered after 12 hours
| > Will keep trying until message is 2 weeks old
| 
| Ok, so we know mailhub1.uq.edu.au had the message at that time and would
| have attempted resends later (at a time of its convenience).  We could
| ETRN the mail server & force delivery of mail queued for humbug.org.au (if
| it accepts ETRN).

Do people still allow ETRN?  I certainly don't (and in fact use
an MTA that doesn't support it).

| > I've heard nothing about this one since this message at 0348 on
| > Sunday.  Another message that was sent on Sunday was accepted by
| > one of the MX hosts and has not yet appeared.  Normally, over
| > such a time, it would have been re-tried ages ago and caliburn
| > would have been up and ...
| 
| I agree.  I would have expected delivery attempts no worse than every few
| hours in most cases.  We should have seen the mail by now.
| 
| I gather the send never got as bounce back?

Not yet, but we're not up to a 7-day or 10-day timeout which
seems to be pretty common[1].

| > Yes, this might even provide some useful clues about mail
| > routing and general message handling.  I don't actually care
| > about the lost messages in this case -- but I do like to know
| > what happens to email that doesn't get to its intended target.
| 
| Same.

I suspect that we won't learn any more about this particular
case, beyond the need to keep good hardware in our machines.

Greg

[1] I personally think that an MTA should bounce email after a
    couple of days -- it's better to let people know there's an
    ongoing problem and leave it to them to try by other means
    if the matter is important.  IMO, of course.

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