mail does bounce (was: Customers down?)

[woods () most weird com (Greg A. Woods)]

[ On Saturday, January 1, 2000 at 15:37:34 (+0100), Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Customers down?
>
> What programs are that? I was under the illusion that everybody mimicked
> sendmails behaviour in that if you cannot get an authoritative answer,
> queue it whatever everything else (basically).

I know for certain that Postfix and Smail will immediately bounce a
message when the domain is authoritatively non-existant.  I'd be very
surprised and dismayed if sendmail and all other true SMTP mailers did
not do exactly the same thing.

If you're lucky/smart enough you can make your main e-mail domain be the
same domain name as one of your registered nameservers and then at least
RFC-974 will have mailers queue outgoing mail to your domain, but that's
about the only way to prevent your mail from bouncing if all of your
authoritative nameservers disappear long enough from the net.  This kind
of trick limits you in other ways though so it won't be ideal for
everyone, and of course if you have more "main" e-mail domains than
registered nameservers (of your own) then you'll be hosed anyway.

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods () acm org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods () planix com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods () weird com>