stuart@bms-at.UUCP (Stuart D. Gathman) (04/26/88)
This is (my personal evaluation of) a summary of E-mail concerning
feedback from failed mail.
The consensus is that positive feedback (from received mail) is only useful
to discover routes to sites not in the maps. It is impractical to scan for this
either manually or automatically.
Note that you will have no occasion to send mail to such a site unless
they send you mail first!
Negative feedback is very useful, even when done
manually. I currently save all failed mail in "mbox.failed" and
review it every night if needed. We get about one failure per week.
I recompile the map whenever changes are made. This takes only a
few minutes on our 68020 box.
The best manual/automatic compromise at present seems to be:
a) users recognize their own failed mail and save it
(with headers) to a file.
b) failed mail (with text deleted if desired) is
forwarded to the administrator.
c) administrator looks at failed headers and extracts
bad links/machines (if any). The adminstrators copy is deleted.
d) the map is recompiled and announced.
e) users forward failed mail to retry. (possibly deleting
extraneous headers)
Recognizing failed mail automatically seems to be possible. For starters,
all smail sites return mail with a subject of "failed mail". Many other
mailers do the same. For now, I just use our PBP (Parallel Biological
Processor) system :-) for recognition.
Note that users can play tricks by faking failed mail unless an
automatic recognition scheme is used. Even then, some other site
can play tricks.
--
Stuart D. Gathman <stuart@bms-at.uucp>
<..!{vrdxhq|daitc}!bms-at!stuart>