Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!iggy.GW.Vitalink.COM!widener!brendan From: brendan@cs.widener.edu (Brendan Kehoe) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Notification of dropped articles [was Re: CNEWS MUST DIE!] Message-ID: <2!Y+66.@cs.widener.edu> Date: 22 May 91 13:33:45 GMT References: Organization: Widener CS Dept Lines: 47 mathew@mantis.co.uk wrote: >> To use that argument is to say that sending mail to foo!bar.com is >> LEGAL under RFC822 because sendmail should be "intelligent" enough to >> replace the ! with a @, since the local site's not connected to a >> system called foo, and therefore it's a typo. Right? Wrong. > >In that case, I would say that sendmail should tell the user about his >mistake. It does, does it not? And, as Eliot Lear discovered recently, if the mistake happens on a large scale, it can completely overwhelm a system. Imagine this: three UUCP sites, hub, midwife, and node. The user at node has broken software, and passes up bogus headers; midwife hasn't updated in a while, so she just passes it right along to the hub. The hub *has* updated its software, and, if implementing your idea, would send back a mail message for any articles coming from midwife (and subsequently node) that had bad headers. Fine if node only sends through a few articles per hour, say. But then comes along a fourth system, unixbox. Unixbox has a few hundred users (say a small company), and gets a Telebit feed from node. The link now looks like: hub <-> midwife <-> node <-> unixbox Say one hundred of those users post articles in an hour; they get batched up. (The people at this company don't do much work.) Since unixbox polls node once an hour, it sends them all on the next call. The articles work their way up to hub, where it screams and spits back one mail message for EACH article. Assuming that there aren't other paths to unixbox (or aren't any cheaper paths, at least), that mail all goes right back down the pipe through midwife and node to unixbox. Why should midwife and node have to deal with spooling and sending 100 mail messages? And spooling a new message for each and every article is unfair overhead on hub, which probably has a few other feeds going at the same time. What if each user posted more than one article, all of which were bad? Anyway, the point is that there *does* need to be a better way than just dropping them on the floor---but user notification probably wouldn't be the best way. Brendan -- Brendan Kehoe - Widener Sun Network Manager - brendan@cs.widener.edu Widener University in Chester, PA A Bloody Sun-Dec War Zone