Re: Mail posting in newsgroups in Gnus

[Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Jude DaShiell wrote:
> > The internet standard for email message delivery is to try for 240 hours 
> > or 10 days whichever comes first then return delivery error report to 
> > the sender if delivery has failed in those 240 hours or 10 days.  It was 
> > designed that way since the internet's original purpose was to survive a 
> > nuclear attack.
> 
> I never saw such long timeouts.

Five days for the undeliverable bounce has been typical as commonly
implemented.  It needs to be long enough to survive a 3-day weekend
failure so that admins can fix it upon return to work.  But three days
is also very common too.  The shortest time possible to positively
diagnose undeliverable mail is desired.  Really long timeouts mean
that undeliverable mail remains in the queue consuming resources upon
retry for the entire time.  And long timeouts mean the user doesn't
get feedback of a problem for that entire time.  As short as practical
is best.

> I generally get a soft error message after 1 hour, and a "hard"
> delivery failure after 2 hours.

Personally I hate those soft warning messages.  I always disable them
on my own mail servers.  They only confuse people these days.  I am
always needing to explain them again and again to people when they
receive them in their mail to random places on the net.  "No your mail
hasn't bounced. Not yet. It might eventually. But it will retry until
then. It just wasn't delivered immediately."  It is tiring.  And worse
is when it is part of backscatter spam.  People are confused because
they get those warning of non-delivery for a spam message that forged
their From: address.  Argh!

Bob