Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 13:36:32 -0400
From: Andrew Sullivan <ajs@crankycanuck.ca>
To: "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@hub.org>
Cc: "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com>,
	Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>, pgsql-www@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: what is up with the PG mailing lists?
Message-ID: <20071101173632.GV27676@crankycanuck.ca>
References: <47299957.5020605@postgresql.org> <2968.1193919208@sss.pgh.pa.us>
	<20071101080959.49f3087b@scratch>
	<20071101152333.GM27676@crankycanuck.ca>
	<4729F105.30704@hagander.net>
	<1127E6493CBA8A29F343C4D7@ganymede.hub.org>
	<4729F7D2.6050608@hagander.net>
	<AD9BF3BA60F6634EA7FCDB76@ganymede.hub.org>
	<20071101092806.3b1fa452@scratch>
	<A43323733D66A14A086CABF7@ganymede.hub.org>
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On Thu, Nov 01, 2007 at 01:42:31PM -0300, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> "450 mailbox unavailable"
>    - great, should be 550, but as its 450, we'll keep retrying

Hehe.  We just had this one, no?  ;-)  This is Yet Another Victim of
the "safe" mail delivery rules in postfix.  They're safe for the
recipient, of course, but hazardous to the Net.
 
> "lost connection with mail.mindef.mil.gt"

This is exactly the sort of thing we have to worry about.  On global
lists with subscribers possibly on crappy connections, the cost to
the relaying mail server go up _exponentially_.  Not everyone is in
well-connected locales, and managing backoff queues is bloody
expensive.  Add a few thousand users to the mix, and things go south
very quickly.

> "Host or domain name not found"

This should just bounce, no?

> "451 SPAM not accepted"
>    - again, if you aren't going to accept it, why temporary fail it so that I 
> try again?

Indeed.  Some clever anti-spam people think that this is a clever
mechanism -- they "force the spammers to pay extra".  The problem is
when their not-quite-as-clever-as-they-thought filters catch
something the wrong way.  The entire Internet pays.  (This is also,
by the way, the basis for the "no thanks" response we should and
usually do give to people who show up with 80% solutions for
"performance problems" in PostgreSQL.)

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
		--George Orwell